NOTES

CHAPTER 1

1. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §80, 134–35.

2. Cirignola, “WOMAD: A Celebration of Cultural Diversity.”

3. Darwin, The Descent of Man, 462; citing The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia (1867), 203.

4. The term tonality refers to the system used in the West since the latter seventeenth century. Tonal music employs the major-minor scheme and makes use of seven-tone scales, the tones of which stand in different degrees of stability. Major and minor keys can be constructed on any of the twelve tones of the chromatic scale (the twelve tones within an octave, which correspond to the piano keys within an octave). Within a key, the tonic, the root tone of a scale, is the tone of greatest stability. Chords constructed from the available tones similarly have different degrees of stability, and they can be arranged to heighten and manipulate tensions. The tonic chord, the chord with greatest stability, is built on the tonic, and it is the chord toward which multivoiced tonal music aims. The tonal system allows for modulation from key to key, and it is associated with tempered tuning, tuning that slightly modifies acoustically pure intervals in order to minimize the dissonances that would otherwise occur as a consequence of multiple modulations from key to key.

5. Hullah, The History of Modern Music, 9.

6. See Becker, “Is Western Art Music Superior?,” 341–59.

7. See Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music. Scruton views himself as a defender of Western civilization, and in this effort this elegant book, clearly a labor of love, elaborates on the power of the Western tonal system and on the role that music plays in articulating cultural values. Despite the fact that my first mention of this book is in the context of criticizing one of its points, I greatly admire it, particularly for its defense of music’s ethical role.

8. Ibid., 266.

9. Ibid., 239.

10. Scruton, “The Eclipse of Listening,” 53. For a discussion of the debate over whether Western tuning is “natural,” see Lerdahl and Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, 290–96. Although they accept the view that “tonality reflects an innate organization of the pitch structure of music” (290), they conclude that “tonality is not simply man’s response to physical facts about sound. . . . The mind is not simply following the physical path of least resistance, as the overtone hypothesis would have it, but is creating its own way of organizing pitch combinations into coherent patterns” (293).

11. Rosen, “Classical Music in Twilight,” 53–54.

12. My thanks to Jay Garfield for drawing this incident to my attention. Cf. Solomon, The Joy of Philosophy, 69.

13. Sachs, The Wellsprings of Music, 218.

14. See Rowell, Thinking about Music, 192–93.

15. See DeWoskin, A Song for One or Two, 101–24.

16. Sorrell, A Guide to the Gamelan, 1.

17. For a description of this gamelan, see Lockspeiser, Debussy: His Life and Mind, 1:115.

18. Dowling and Harwood point out that instruments in Indonesian gamelan orchestras need to be retuned frequently, and that this involves several kinds of physical modifications. See Music Cognition, 103.

19. Lockspeiser, Debussy: His Life and Mind, 1:115.

20. George Harrison first introduced the sitar into the Beatles’ music in “Norwegian Wood” on the 1965 album Rubber Soul (EMI/Parlophone). The members of Ladysmith Black Mambazo are not the only African musicians with whom Paul Simon collaborated on Graceland (Warner Bros. Records, 1986). Others include Bakithi Kumalo, Ray Phiri, Demola Adepoju, Youssou N’Dour, Isaac Mtshali, Morris Goldberg, and the groups Stimela, Tau Ea Matsekha, General M. D. Shirinda and the Gaza Sisters, and the Boyoyo Boys band. Presumably Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s appearance drew particular attention because of the furor that arose over Simon’s collaborating with anyone from South Africa during the era of apartheid. Simon had already made use of “non-Western” style on Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge over Troubled Waters, in “El Condor Pasa,” an Andean folk song. For discussion of some of the issues surrounding Simon’s appropriations, as well as the general problem of whether Western appropriation of non-Western music benefits those from whom the music is borrowed, see Charles Hamm, “Graceland Revisited,” and Feld, “Notes on ‘World Beat.’”

21. Stephen Davies notes that there is considerable tension within the field of ethnomusicology between those in anthropology and those affiliated with music departments, with the latter sometimes dismissing the musical sensitivity of the former (personal communication).

22. Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 379.

23. Stephen Davies is one of these noteworthy exceptions. See, for example, Musical Works and Performances, 254–94, and “Life Is a Passacaglia.”

24. Kivy, Sound Sentiment, 94. Kivy contrasts the listening expectations of someone whose musical background is Western and geared to a mainly harmonic way of organizing polyphonic music with the semitone as the smallest available interval, with those of the person whose expectations were developed by Indian music, which is organized mainly horizontally and includes microtones. Kivy’s paradigm of “Western” music is clearly based on models later than the Renaissance, when choral music was also organized horizontally, with the melodic lines of different voices having relative independence of one another. Kivy also overemphasizes the role of microtones in Indian music. Although the tones available for a raga, and particularly for required ornaments, include tones at intervals less than a semitone, ragas are formed in discrete steps, with approximately the same number of tones as Western scales. Ragas must include at least five tones, and many have seven tones, sometimes with differences between ascending and descending versions. The use of these variants is comparable to the common employment of different versions of the ascending and descending statements of the minor scale in Western music. This implies that only very seldom is a tone succeeded by a microtonally proximate tone, and then almost always when one of the tones ornaments another. Thus the danger of microtones interfering with general perception of musical contour, which Kivy contends would be a serious problem for Western listeners, does not seem to be significant. Moreover, the structure of most Hindustani music involves an initial section (the alap) in which the raga is explored, familiarizing even the novice listener with its basic shape, before a more freewheeling exposition occurs. See Rowell, Music and Musical Thought in Early India, 42, 80, 147, and 168; and Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 120.

25. Jerrold Levinson similarly notes that scholarly expertise on matters of musical structure has distorted scholars’ understanding of the actual experience of most listeners. See Levinson, Music in the Moment. Many ethnomusicologists have also criticized scholars for excessively focusing on the musically elite. See Blacking, How Musical Is Man?

26. I discuss music’s ethical impact in Higgins, The Music of Our Lives.

27. See London, “Musical and Linguistic Speech Acts,” and Lidov, Is Language a Music?

28. Daniel Barenboim, Reith Lectures 2006, Lecture 1.

29. Aniruddh Patel indicates such a case. The supposedly “universal law” in the perception of both speech and music that “a lengthened sound tends to mark the end of a group,” has been undercut by recent evidence that English and Japanese speakers differ in their respective groupings of tones, with English speakers perceiving in accordance with the predicted short-long pattern, but Japanese speakers perceiving in accordance with the contrasting pattern of long-short. See Patel, Music, Language, and the Brain, hereafter indicated as MLB, 169–73.

30. See MLB, 319–20. For an illuminating discussion of the sense of motion in music, see Clarke, Ways of Listening, 62–90. Clarke argues that the sense of movement is fictional and an inevitable by-product of the fact that our auditory systems are fine-tuned for detecting motion. See also Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, 19; Lidov, Is Language a Music?, 120 and 146.

31. Dame Evelyn Glennie’s performance career indicates that the deaf are not inherently prevented by their disability from engaging with music even at a very high level. Glennie, who has been deaf since the age of twelve, is a virtuoso percussionist, able to perform solos with a symphony orchestra. She often performs barefoot to enhance her tactile experience of the music. My thanks to Stephen Davies for suggesting this example. We should also note that Beethoven’s deafness did not prevent him from composing masterpieces (though admittedly his deafness was acquired late in life).

32. See Sacks, Musicophilia, 98–119. See also Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales.

33. See Blacking, How Musical Is Man?

34. The ambivalent role of recording technology is complicated, and a topic worthy of analysis. It both enables amateur performers to make their music available to others beyond their immediate environment and promotes the idea of music as a product that only a subset of the population produces.

35. See Zatorre and Halpern, “Mental Concerts.” Cf. Davies, “Perceiving Melodies and Perceiving Musical Colors.”

36. No doubt, many who hear background music are not actively engaged but may in fact attempt to tune it out. I do not mean to include this kind of passive or resistant “consumption” (if one can even call it that) as “listening.”

37. See Mehler et al., “A Precursor of Language Acquisition in Young Infants,” 143–78.

CHAPTER 2

1. Aristotle, Politics, 8.7.1341b.1.35–40, 1315.

2. Ibid., 8.7.1340a.1.4, 1311.

3. Ibid., 8.7.1341a.1.12–15, 1313.

4. See MLB, 100. Patel notes, however, that some species, such as frogs and some insects, do synchronize their calls with each other.

5. For a discussion of such views, see Kivy, “Platonism in Music.”

6. See, for example, Cook, Music, Imagination, and Culture, 223. See also Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, 3–6. In making the case that music is not identical to physical sound, Scruton makes use of a thought experiment imagining a “music room,” in which we hear music in the absence of vibrations or a sound source. He suggests that the imaginability of such a scenario demonstrates the distinguishability of music and physical reality, and he goes on to argue that listeners hear “sounds apart from the material world” (221). This move is illegitimate in my opinion. The fact that we use our minds to organize and make sense of sounds that we hear as music does not mean the sounds themselves are immaterial. We can obviously imagine sounds apart from a physical sound source; we do that every time we imagine music in our heads. But this does not mean that the music we are imagining, were it actual, would be separate from the material world. Scruton is also right that the systemic grid of tonal space is not identical to the Newtonian grid, which we mentally impose on physical space in order to determine relative distances among things in the world. Thus the way we organize musical events in sound space is not the same as the way we map the spatial organization of the instruments of the orchestra; but this does not mean that we dissociate music from our actual environment. We hear the world as resounding, not just our mental space.

7. See Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, 89–95. Goehr’s argument derives from Morris Weitz’s case for considering “art” an open concept. See Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics.”

8. Blacking, How Musical Is Man?, 10.

9. This might suggest that I should define music simply as “organized sound,” Edgar Varèse’s characterization. I opt for Blacking’s, despite the fact that it appears to exclude animal music, because I want to reflect the fact that the imposition of order relevant to the notion of music comes from human beings, if only in their interpretation of environmental sound “as music.” Strictly, then, I would not need to modify Blacking’s definition to include animal sounds. Because “humanly organized sound” connotes the external production of sounds by human beings, however, I make explicit reference to animals in my rather awkward-sounding coda to Blacking’s formulation.

10. Because I consider “humanly organized sound” to include any sounds that we can hear as organized, I think environmental sound can fit Blacking’s definition of music, as can computer music and other kinds of music generated by machines. If one prefers to interpret “humanly organized sound” as restricted to the production of sounds and not the interpretation of sounds that are heard, computer and other machine music might still be included on the grounds that human beings produced the machines that produce the music, though admittedly this is production at one remove.

11. One of these is likely Jerrold Levinson, who seeks “a set of conditions that are necessary and sufficient” for an instance being music. He contends, “We will have succeeded if all and only those things that, on reflection and after consulting our intuitions, we are willing to count as music—in the primary (i.e., artistic) sense—satisfy the proposed conditions.” Not surprisingly, he rejects both “organized sound” and “humanly organized sound” as definitions of music. Levinson, “The Concept of Music,” 268 and 270.

12. See Cantrick, “If the Semantics of Music Theorizing Is Broke, Let’s Fix It,” 245–46. Although unlikely to be sympathetic to my freewheeling attitude toward the scope of the term music, Robert Cantrick raises a point that suggests another motivation for not demanding a hard and fast definition. He argues that it is difficult to establish that any particular sound is musical because recognizing a sound as musical depends on the context of a particular natural language that makes reference to music, specifically, by means of technical terms within ordinary language.

. . . when theorizing about art music in Europe during several centuries before the twentieth, one knows that any sound is musical only if it is in a key.

. . . when theorizing about art music in the Arab Middle East during several centuries before the twentieth, one knows that any sound is musical only if it is in a maqām.

. . . when theorizing about art music in the Hindustani tradition of north India during several centuries before the twentieth, one knows that any sound is musical only if it is in a thāt. (245–46)

I disagree with Cantrick’s suggestion that the mediation of technical language or the context it theoretically indicates is necessary to recognize that a particular sound is musical. A sound’s appearance in the culture’s relevant musical context is evidence that the sound is musical, but I do not think that one can only consider a sound musical if one observes that it occurs in a context such as key. This would seem to exclude the sounds of many percussive instruments from being musical because they are not pitched. It would also rule out expressive deviations from the pitches indicated in such contexts. Nevertheless, I think that Cantrick is right to suggest that listeners within a given musical culture tend to presuppose, on the basis of hearing a sound they take to be musical, that it can be accommodated within the larger matrix within which musical sounds occur, and that such matrices cannot be assumed to be the same across cultures.

13. For an interesting discussion of whether John Cage’s 4′33″ should be considered music, see Davies, Themes in the Philosophy of Music, 11–29. Arthur Danto’s account that “an atmosphere of theory” determines what sort of things count as art in a given time and place was designed for just such cases. See Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 135. For a critical response to this view, see Davies, “Life Is a Passacaglia.”

14. The philosopher in question is Paul Griffiths.

15. Although individuals sometimes have idiosyncratic understandings of the criteria for a classificatory definition, the evaluative nature of an honorific definition of a word is more obviously susceptible to idiosyncratic or privately subjective judgments as to whether the word applies to a particular case.

16. Feld, “Sound Structure as Social Structure,” 390 and 393.

17. Cage’s 4′33″ would not appear be music on this definition, which is a limitation. However, we might construe this work as urging us to listen to environmental sounds as if they were organized. In this case, Cage would implicitly be relying on a notion of music as organized sound, though “humanly” organized only in the listener’s imposition of an interpretive frame.

18. This opposes the view of some theorists, such as Levinson, who do think that music needs to be appreciated for its own sake to count as music. See “The Concept of Music,” 273, where Levinson defines music as “sounds temporally organized by a person for the purpose of enriching or intensifying experience through active engagement (e.g., listening, dancing, performing) with the sounds regarded primarily, or in significant measure, as sounds.” Although he does allow that some other purposeful activity is going on besides appreciating the sounds for their own sake, he does not seem overly concerned to include all non-Western phenomena that I would pretheoretically call music: “But if a phenomenon in another culture with some resemblance to music simply cannot be encompassed in the broadest notion of music we can discover in our own conceptual scheme, then it is a confusion to say, for instance, out of misplaced liberality, that it is at least music ‘to them’” (269n).

19. The New Caledonian crow (Corvus moneduloides) customizes twigs and leaves to make them more useful for digging food out of crevices. See Weir, Chappell, and Kacelnik, “Shaping of Hooks in New Caledonian Crows,” 981. See also Hunt and Gray, “Diversification and Cumulative Evolution in New Caledonian Crow Tool Manufacture.” Reports have also been made of tool use among chimps, orangutans, and Galapagos woodpecker finches. See Visalberghi and McGrew, “Cebus meets Pan.”

20. MLB, 10. Patel denies we have evidence that the meaning of humpback whale song is associated with the sequencing of elements; and he contends that their songs “always seem to mean the same thing, in other words, a combination of a sexual advertisement to females and an intermale dominance display.” Similarly, he considers birdsong to be confined to a limited range of meanings. Appropriately, however, he cautiously phrases his points, referring to how the situation “appears” (to us).

21. Kant, The Critique of Judgment, 94. See Parret, “Kant on Music and the Hierarchy of the Arts,” 257.

22. See Hartshorne, “Metaphysics Contributes to Ornithology,” 127–28, 131, and 133.

23. Feld, “Sound Structure as Social Structure,” 395. See also Feld, “Aesthetics as Iconicity of Style, or ‘Lift-up-over Sounding,’” 88; and Feld, Sound and Sentiment, 181: “Song is communication from a bird’s point of view, communication of one who becomes a bird.”

24. My thanks to Stephen Davies for drawing my attention to this musical practice. His source was an unpublished paper by John Fisher, “The New Guinea Drone Beetle vs. the Teutonic Symphony Orchestra: Beholding Music Cross-Culturally,” presented to the American Society for Aesthetics, Asilomar, California, April 1994.

25. For example, hear Kate Bush, “Moving,” on The Kick Inside (1977), EMI SW-17003.

26. Trevor Wishart, Vox 5 (1986). Cf. McAdams and Matzkin, “The Roots of Musical Variation in Perceptual Similarity and Invariance,” 81.

27. See Feld, “Aesthetics as Iconicity of Style, or ‘Lift-up-over Sounding,’” 88. See also Feld, “Sound Structure as Social Structure,” 395.

28. Paul Lansky, Homebrew (1992), BCD 9035 Bridge.

29. See Allen, Philosophies of Music History, 51. Cf. Herzog, “Music in the Thinking of the American Indian,” 9. Herzog also points out that many Native American tribes hold that songs were given by the Creator at the beginning of creation, or even before creation emerged.

30. See Allen, Philosophies of Music History, 51 and 5–7. Cf. Nasr, “Islam and Music,” 221.

31. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura), Book V, lines 1379–412, pp. 174–75.

32. For further discussion of theories of the divine origins of music, see Allen, Philosophies of Music History, 12, 24, 52.

33. Miller, “Evolution of Human Music through Sexual Selection,” 330. Miller goes on to qualify this statement, however, in that he acknowledges that in 1773 Daines Barrington, claiming that birdsong must be functional for the birds, proposed that it is useful in territorial competition among males.

34. Darwin, The Descent of Man, 571.

35. Armstrong, in New York Times, July 7, 1971, 41.

36. Graham, “The Value of Music,” 151.

37. Slater, “Birdsong Repertoires,” 60: “Although animals may not share music in the strict sense with us, there is no doubt that some of them do have complex and beautiful vocal displays.”

38. Darwin, The Descent of Man, 568; citing Waterhouse, from W. C. L. Martin’s General Introduction to Natural History of Mamm. Animals, 1841, 432; Owen, Anatomy of Vertebrates, 3:600.

39. Darwin, The Descent of Man, 568; citing Lockwood, American Naturalist, 761.

40. Graham, “The Value of Music,” 150.

41. Gordon’s argument also ignores the “musicality” that the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea find in waterfalls, with which they often sing. See Feld, “Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea,” 132–34.

42. Whaling, “What’s behind a Song?,” 65–67.

43. Merker, “Synchronous Chorusing and Human Origins,” 321. The report he mentions is Boesch, “Symbolic Communication in Wild Chimpanzees?,” 83.

44. Maconie, The Second Sense, 3.

45. See Marler, “Origins of Music and Speech,” 33.

46. Falk, “Hominid Brain Evolution and the Origins of Music,” 210; referring to Schaller, The Mountain Gorilla, 223, 226.

47. Falk, “Hominid Brain Evolution and the Origins of Music,” 210. See also Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe, 133; and Schaller, The Mountain Gorilla, 226.

48. Darwin, The Descent of Man, 460–61.

49. Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, 160. Scruton is clearly asserting the superiority of human beings. He comments, “Appearances can cease to matter to us only by beginning to dominate our lives, as they dominate the lives of animals. The person who cannot contemplate appearances, surrenders to the trajectory of getting and begetting which makes each merely animal life dispensable” (370).

50. Radford, “Emotions and Music,” 74.

51. Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 62. Hanslick’s statement is not praise for the power of music; he is rejecting the view that music has a positive moral effect on listeners. He goes on, “But is it really so commendable to be a music lover in such company?” Reports of music’s effects on animals are nothing new. Varro (Marcus Terentius Varro, 116–27 BCE) claimed that the Gauls reported that the playing of timbrels tamed a lion. See Schueller, The Idea of Music, 111.

52. Shaw, Keeping Mozart in Mind, 240. The seals apparently dislike fast music, for they disappear when the violinist plays jigs or similar music. They seem to prefer slow, melodic music.

53. See Lerdahl and Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, 290. See Wright et al., “Music Perception and Octave Generalization in Rhesus Monkeys,” 291–307. Rhesus monkeys recognized songs transposed by an octave, but did not recognize the same songs transposed at other intervals. See also Fishman et al., “Consonance and Dissonance of Musical Chords: Neural Correlates in Auditory Cortex of Monkeys and Humans,” 2761–88, which provides evidence of similar cortical response patterns to consonance and dissonance in human beings and macaques. My thanks to Stephen Davies for drawing these references to my attention.

54. See Shehadi, Philosophies of Music in Medieval Islam, 27, 60, and 120. See also Becker, Deep Listeners, 79.

55. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 569n.

56. Ibid., 568–69; citing Mr. R. Brown, in Proceedings of the Zoological Society, 1868, 410.

57. See Juslin and Laukka, “Communication of Emotions in Vocal Expression and Music Performance,” 773.

58. Mâche, “The Necessity of and Problems with a Universal Musicology,” 475–77.

59. Slater, “Birdsong Repertoires,” 60.

60. Wolfgang Welsch pursues a similar line of argument in “Animal Aesthetics.” See also Miller, “Evolution of Human Music through Sexual Selection,” 341–44; Staal, “Mantras and Bird Songs,” 555; and Mâche, “The Necessity of and Problems with a Universal Musicology,” 478.

61. Darwin, Descent of Man, 569.

62. Hartshorne, “Metaphysics Contributes to Ornithology,” 127–28, 131, 133.

63. Music’s strength as a mnemonic depends on its connection with very basic sensory operations. Klaus Scherer and Marcel Zentner propose that music may be so effective in causing recollection of emotional experiences because “music, like odours, may be treated at lower levels of the brain that are particularly resistant to modifications by later input, contrary to cortically based episodic memory” (“Emotional Effects of Music: Production Rules,” 369).

64. Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility, 35.

65. See Ellis, Aboriginal Music, Education for Living, 59 and 126; Chatwin, The Songlines, 13–14 and 108; Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 234; and Roberts, Ancient Hawaiian Music.

66. See Rudinow, Soul Music, 173–95. See also McAllester, Enemy Way Music; Roseman, Healing Sounds from the Malaysian Rainforest; Ellis, Aboriginal Music; and de Muris, Summa Musicae, III, 195b.

67. Hodges, “Human Musicality,” 31.

68. Juslin and Laukka, “Communication of Emotions in Vocal Expression and Music Performance,” 773. They cite Snowden, “Expression of Emotion in Nonhuman Animals”; Jürgens, “Vocalization as an Emotion Indicator”; Davitz, “Personality, Perceptual, and Cognitive Correlates of Emotional Sensitivity”; Scherer, “Vocal Affect Signalling”; Scherer, “Vocal Affect Expression”; Morton, “On the Occurrence and Significance of Motivation-Structural Rules in Some Birds and Mammal Sounds”; and Ohala, “Cross-Language Use of Pitch.”

69. Freeman, “A Neurobiological Role of Music in Social Bonding,” 412.

70. See Hodges, “Neuromusical Research,” 209.

71. Slater, “Birdsong Repertoires,” 57.

72. Giessmann, “Gibbon Songs and Human Music from an Evolutionary Perspective,” 103.

73. Ibid., 107.

74. Sloboda, The Musical Mind, 18.

75. See MLB, 243; and Balaban, “Bird Song Syntax.”

76. Saffran, “Mechanisms of Musical Memory in Infancy,” 38.

77. Payne, “The Progressively Changing Songs of Humpback Whales,” 139.

78. Marler, “Origins of Music and Speech,” 31 and 41. See also MLB, 244–59; and Hodges, “Neuromusical Research,” 208.

79. MLB, 244.

80. See ibid., 244–59.

81. That is, unless you want to characterize music produced by machines such as computers as outside the purview of “human music,” in which case there would be two categories: human music and machine music.

82. Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 90–91.

83. See Koopman and Davies, “Musical Meaning in a Broader Perspective,” 268–71.

84. It is also to ignore the fact that some animals, such as vervet monkeys, do signal different referents depending on the situation. See Marler, Evans, and Hauser, “Animal Signals: Reference, Motivation or Both?” Strangely, Patel considers meaning within animal music to be restricted to a single message, or at most to a very restricted one: “animal songs always advertise the same set of things, including readiness to mate, territorial warnings, and social status” (MLB, 356). Clearly, he is taking “meaning” to be objective and evident to us in these statements.

85. Kant makes the interesting point that we can find beauty in the song of a bird, but that this would be spoiled for us if we discovered that a human being were producing the music. See Kant, Critique of Judgment, 94.

86. Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, 171–72.

87. According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration website, “One of the purposes was to send a message to extraterrestrials who might find the spacecraft as the spacecraft journeyed through interstellar space.” http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/languages/background.html.

88. The sounds of a volcanic eruption, a rocket takeoff, animals, a mother and child, meteorological phenomena, the ocean surf, laughter, a kiss, human speech and movement, fire, tools, machines, Morse code, life signs, pulsar, and the music of the spheres were all included.

89. Printed greetings from President Jimmy Carter and United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim were also sent with the two spacecraft.

90. Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, 460.

CHAPTER 3

1. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel, 1956.

2. Nettl, “On the Question of Universals,” 3.

3. Trehub, “Human Processing Predispositions and Musical Universals,” 441. She suggests that the familiar feeling may have come from “the apparent diatonicity of the underlying scale.” See also Kilmer, Crocker, and Brown, Sounds from Silence; Trehub, “Musical Predispositions in Infancy,” 9; Trehub, Unyk, and Trainor, “Adults Identify Infant-Directed Music across Cultures”; Unyk et al., “Lullabies and Simplicity.”

4. Blacking, “Can Musical Universals Be Heard?,” 22.

5. Blacking, How Musical Is Man?, 109.

6. See Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 24.

7. An interval produced by the simultaneous sounding of two tones is called harmonic. An interval produced by two tones sounding successively is called a melodic interval. Intervals are labeled by the number of tones of the diatonic scale that are included in the distance between them. Thus the interval from C to the closest E is a third, because three tones of the diatonic scale fit into the distance between pitches: C, D, and E.

8. See Helson, Adaptation-Level Theory, 382–87. Helson attributes this theory to McClelland et al., The Achievement Motive.

9. Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 87.

10. David Huron describes the opening of The Rite of Spring as shocking because of three departures from Western conventions for orchestral works: beginning with a solo, beginning with a solo by a bassoon, and putting the bassoon at the top of its range. See Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 270.

11. Lerdahl and Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, 291.

12. MLB, 260.

13. For a discussion of the nonuniversality of scales, see Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression, 236.

14. A semitone is approximately the distance between two adjacent keys on the piano, for example, C and C-sharp. I say “approximately” because the tuning of the piano is tempered tuning, not tuning in accordance with pure acoustics.

15. Ornaments, in this context, typically involve the addition of one or more additional notes (sometimes a standardized melodic figure) to a particular note.

16. Tran Van Khe, “Is the Pentatonic Universal?” Nevertheless, Tran concludes, “Don’t you believe, as I do, after all of this, that the pentatonic phenomenon is truly universal?” (83).

17. Equal tempering evolved independently in China, and the baroque employment of equal tempering occurred after Europe learned in approximately 1630 of the discovery of a precise mathematics for this kind of tuning by Zhu Zaiyu (in approximately 1580). See Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 94.

18. The equal temperament system as used in the West divides the octave into twelve steps that are logarithmically equal.

19. As we go around the circle of fifths, dissonance between the pure octave and the pure fifth becomes gradually greater. This results in intonation differences between instruments played in different keys.

20. For an interesting account of the way master musicians initially approach foreign music, see Hopkins, “Aural Thinking,” 143–61. Hopkins observes that the musicians initially focused on the rhythmic pattern, attempting to relate it to rhythmic patterns with which they were familiar, and they demonstrated perplexity when they could not assimilate what they were hearing with categories to which they were accustomed.

21. MLB, 18.

22. Yuen Ren Chao, “The Non-Uniqueness of Phonemic Solutions of Phonetic Systems,” 33n; reprinted in Joos, Readings in Linguistics, 1:51.

23. Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression, 245.

24. For an example, see Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?,” 121–23.

25. Hood, “Universal Attributes of Music,” 66.

26. See MLB, 11.

27. Ibid., 11.

28. Nattiez makes essentially this distinction, differentiating between “strategies of perception or esthetic strategies” and “strategies of production.” See “Under What Conditions Can One Speak of the Universals of Music?,” 102.

29. Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 238–39.

30. Harwood, “Universals in Music,” 524.

31. Ibid., 525. See also Herndon, “Analysis: The Herding of Sacred Cows?,” 248.

32. Bregman, “Auditory Scene Analysis,” 23.

33. See Blacking, “Extensions and Limits of Musical Transformations,” paper presented at 1972 Society for Ethnomusicology conference, Toronto; cited in Feld, “Linguistic Models in Ethnomusicology,” 207.

34. Walker, Musical Beliefs, 47.

35. See Harwood, “Universals in Music,” 525.

36. Ibid., 525. For empirical support, see Bachem, “Time Factors in Relative and Absolute Pitch Determination”; and Deutsch, “Octave Generalization of Specific Interference Effects in Memory for Tonal Pitch.”

37. See Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 93, 113, and 238. Diana Deutsch and Richard C. Boulanger, however, point out in “Octave Equivalence and the Immediate Recall of Pitch Sequences” that perceptual recognition of octave equivalence can be enhanced or addled by contextual factors. Tonal music tends to reinforce octave equivalence by means of such techniques as frequent octave jumps and octave doubling, learned conventions, and the implication with regard to what the next tone in a series will be that either a tone or its octave double will be suitable. Steward Hulse and his colleagues also point out that when tones are not arranged into a musical structure, but are simply played in isolation, listeners do not reliably equate tones with their counterparts in other octaves, and that the ability to do so seems related to musical training. See Hulse, Takeuchi, and Braaten, “Perceptual Invariances in the Comparative Psychology of Music,” 155–56.

38. Demany and Armand, “The Perceptual Reality of Tone Chroma in Early Infancy.”

39. Dowling and Harwood note certain exceptions to this generalization. See Music Cognition, 93: “The only exceptions we have found are certain groups of Australian aborigines. In their cultures, melodic imitations at roughly octave intervals do not always use the same logarithmic scale intervals, and when men and women sing together, they do so in unison and not in octaves.” In general, however, scales are developed on the basis of octave equivalence, with the size of differences in pitch being correlated with differences in frequency of vibrations. They consider the relationship between pitch differences and frequency ratios to be logarithmic (such that “equal differences in pitch correspond to equal ratios of frequency”), although they acknowledge that the notion of scales as logarithmic is not universally accepted (see 238). See, for example, Catherine J. Ellis’s “Pre-Instrumental Scales,” in which she argues that the scales for some of the Central Australian Aboriginals she studied appear to be arithmetical rather than logarithmic, as do some of the scales that others have studied.

40. See Ward, “Subjective Musical Pitch”; Hood, “Slendro and Pelog Redefined”; and Burns, “Octave Adjustment by Non-Western Musicians.” Burns and Ward indicate that octave stretching seems to be fairly universal. See Burns and Ward, “Intervals, Scales, and Tuning,” 263. See also Harwood, “Universals in Music,” 526, and Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 101–2 and 238.

41. See Dowling, “Scale and Contour”; Idson and Massaro, “A Bidimensional Model of Pitch in the Recognition of Melodies”; Kallman and Massaro, “Tone Chroma Is Functional in Melody Recognition”; Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 23; and MLB, 23–24. Studies have shown, however, that contour becomes a less important processing factor as the length of melodies increases. See Edworthy, “Interval and Contour in Melody Processing”; and Dowling and Bartlett, “The Importance of Interval Information in Long-Term Memory for Melodies.” Harwood cites a number of studies that have focused on the cross-cultural importance of contour. See Harwood, “Universals in Music,” 527; Becker, Traditional Music in Modern Java: Gamelan in a Changing Society; Becker, “The Anatomy of a Mode”; Williamson, “Aspects of Traditional Style Maintained in Burma’s First 13 Kyo Songs”; Kolinsky, “‘Barbara Allen’: Tonal versus Melodic Structure, Part I”; Kolinsky, “‘Barbara Allen’: Tonal versus Melodic Structure, Part II”; Seeger, “Versions and Variants of the Tunes of ‘Barbara Allen.’” See also Carterette and Kendall, “On the Tuning and Stretched Octave of Javanese Gamelans”; Carterette, “Timbre, Tuning and Stretched Octave of Javanese Gamelans”; Carterette and Kendall, “Comparative Music Perception and Cognition”; and Burns, “Octave Adjustment by Non-Western Musicians.”

42. Harwood, “Universals in Music,” 527. See also Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 238. They point out that although piano tuning stretches octaves, the octaves on pianos are stretched by only half the amount that listeners subjectively stretch the octave, so that high frequency partials of piano strings are mutually consistent with each other. The fact that the stretched octave in piano tuning does not supplant subjective stretching is evidence “for the inherent nature of the stretched octave for successive tones” (103). The tuning of non-Western instruments provides further evidence, as does a study of non-Western listeners, in Burns, “Octave Adjustment by Non-Western Musicians,” S25.

43. Chang and Trehub, “Auditory Processing of Relational information by Young Infants.” For a practical illustration of the importance of contour, see Agawu, “Music in the Funeral Traditions of the Akpafu,” especially 89.

44. See Bregman, “Auditory Scene Analysis: Hearing in Complex Environments,” 21. See also Bregman and Dannenbring, “The Effect of Continuity on Auditory Stream Segregation.”

45. My thanks to Stephen Davies for suggesting this example.

46. See Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 239; Sloboda, The Musical Mind, 23; and MLB, 24–26 and 201. Sloboda notes greater evidence of categorical pitch perception among musicians than among nonmusicians (25). For experimental evidence that categorical perception corresponds to the intervals of the scales used in one’s culture, see Perlman and Krumhansl, “An Experimental Study of Internal Interval Standards in Javanese and Western Music.”

47. I refer to these beats as acoustical in order to differentiate them from the rhythmic beats (the “strong” and “weak” beats) involved in meter.

48. Trehub, “Human Processing Predispositions and Musical Universals,” 431. See also Sachs, The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West; Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music, hereafter EMM; Trehub, Schellenberg, and Hill, “The Origins of Music Perception and Cognition”; and MLB, 21–22.

49. Trehub, “Human Processing Predispositions and Musical Universals,” 431.

50. See Tramo et al., “Neurobiology of Harmony Perception,” 132. See also Malmberg, “The Perception of Consonance and Dissonance”; Guernsey, “The Role of Consonance and Dissonance in Music”; Butler and Daston, “Musical Consonance as Musical Preference”; and Agawu, “Music in the Funeral Traditions of the Akpafu,” 90. Agawu notes the prominence of the fourth in funeral dirges of the Akpafu people in Ghana.

51. Trehub, “Human Processing Predispositions and Musical Universals,” 431.

52. Burns and Ward, in “Intervals, Scales, and Tuning,” observe that scales of discrete pitches are “essentially universal,” the only exceptions being a few styles that lack discrete pitch relationships (see 243). See also Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 90–91, 98, and 238. They note that Debussy and others have experimented with whole-tone scales (scales in which the distance between adjacent tones is uniformly two semitones), but conclude, “the consensus among musicians is that it fails to offer enough intervallic variety to qualify as anything more than a novelty” (98). Dowling and Harwood note, however, that there are also exceptions to the alleged universality of scales with discrete pitches, noting that some societies utilize chants that involve only two notes. They cite as an example Hawaiian oli chant, which focuses on a single note but also employs a considerably lower, secondary pitch, although its distance from the first tone may vary. Such two-pitch chants also occur in other parts of the world, and the interval between the two tones may widen, “perhaps in continuous fashion,” as the excitement of the chant grows (90–91). See also Roberts, Ancient Hawaiian Music, 70; Burns and Ward, “Intervals, Scales, and Tuning,” 243; Sachs, The Wellsprings of Music, 61; and Malm, Music Cultures of the Pacific, the Near East, and Asia, 13.

Nicholas Cook also denies that it is appropriate to define music in terms of scales of discrete notes, given that some cultures’ music fluctuates around “the notional pitches in terms of which the music is organized.” He mentions “Japanese shakuhachi music and the sanjo music of Korea,” as well as music that does not feature discrete pitches, such as “African percussion music” (Music, Imagination, and Culture, 10). The Samaritans near Tel Aviv and Nablus, according to Bruno Nettl, have a form of group singing that “has indistinct pitches and only very vaguely defined relationships among the voices” (“An Ethnomusicologist Contemplates Musical Universals,” 471). Stephen Davies also points out that in certain music of the Australian Aborigines “glissandos and portamentos are so prominent that it is misleading to regard the sound structure as involving discrete notes or intervals. Many works contain untuned musical sounds—body slaps, hand claps, clap-sticks, rattle, tambourines, castanets, cymbals, tam tam, drums, unbossed gongs, wind machines, or typewriters.” Davies, Musical Works and Performances, 49.

53. Peretz, “Brain Specialization for Music,” 201.

54. See MLB, 17.

55. See Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 93 and 238.

56. See Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.”

57. See Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 91. Burns and Ward, “Intervals, Scales, and Tuning,” 246. See also MLB, 19.

58. See Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 238; Francès, The Perception of Music, 34–35.

59. In some cases, however, this hierarchical weighting is relative. Monique Brandily points out that in the Teda people of Chad, “the status of each degree within the hierarchy is not constant throughout each piece. . . . On the contrary, the status of a scale degree varies according to its position in one or another of the segments constituting the whole.” Brandily, “Songs to Birds among the Teda of Chad,” 383.

60. See MLB, 20.

61. Don Harrán notes that the long and short durations of neumes derived “from the longs and shorts of ancient metrical poetry.” Harrán, Word-Tone Relations in Musical Thought, 1.

62. Monahan and Carterette, in “Pitch and Duration as Determinants of Musical Space,” demonstrate that experimental subjects relied more on durations than on pitches to make judgments of similarity in musical pattern. Widely differing rhythm patterns accompanying the same pitch pattern also influenced subjects to judge the pitch patterns different even when they were identical. See also McAdams and Matzkin, “The Roots of Musical Variation in Perceptual Similarity and Invariance,” 90–91.

63. See Lerdahl and Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, 70. However, cultures do show some variance in beat perception, at least when comparing music from their own culture to that of another. Drake and Ben El Heni showed that French subjects keeping time to music did so more slowly for French music than for Tunisian, and that Tunisian subjects did the reverse. See Drake and Ben El Heni, “Synchronizing with Music: Intercultural Differences.”

64. See McAdams and Matzkin, “The Roots of Musical Variation in Perceptual Similarity and Invariance,” 90.

65. Drake and Bertrand, “The Quest for Universals in Temporal Processing,” 25–28. See also Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 186–87 and 239; and Sloboda, The Musical Mind, 28–30.

66. Sloboda, The Musical Mind, 29–30.

67. See Epstein, “Tempo Relations in Music: A Universal?” Dowling and Harwood (Music Cognition, 181–82) point out that much evidence supports the idea of “a weakly felt natural pace” of 1.3–1.7 psychological events per second, or events paced about 0.6 to 0.75 seconds apart. See also Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, 1:393–94. Bowlby points out that infants are soothed by rocking at the right speed (approximately sixty cycles per minute). Dowling and Harwood note, however, that this natural pace varies with persons, contexts, and tasks. They also note that “rhythmic subdivisions can . . . be said to be encoded in rhythmic contours of relative, not absolute, temporal relationships” (187–88). They refer to Monahan, Parallels between Pitch and Time: The Determinants of Musical Space. See also Clynes, Sentics, 88–90; and Clynes, “When Time Is Music.” Clynes points out that there is remarkable consistency of timing among musicians who interpret the same work.

68. Specifically, he studied samples from “the !ko and G/wi groups in the Kalahari desert of Africa, from a Tibetan monastery, from the Navari caste of Nepal, from the Yanomami Indians in the Orinoco River region of South America (Venezuela), from the Medlpa of the Papua coastal region of New Guinea, and from the Eipo of the mountainous central highlands of New Guinea” (100). Epstein contends that if proportional tempo keeping is so precise across the world, there must be a biological basis for it.

69. Epstein, “Tempo Relations in Music: A Universal?” See, in particular, 112.

70. Leibniz, Letters, Leibnitii Epistolae ad diversos, ep. 154, as translated by E. F. J. Payne, in Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1:256n. See also Leibniz, “Principles of Nature and Grace,” 17.

71. Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 154. Lerdahl and Jackendoff also emphasize the relevance of Gestalt principles of musical organization to their ambitious generative theory of tonal music. See A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, 40–43 and 302–7.

72. Meyer, “A Pride of Prejudices; or, Delight in Diversity,” 276.

73. Trehub also describes “the relevance of gestalt principles of grouping” as a music processing universal. See “Human Processing Predispositions and Musical Universals,” 431 and 435. See also Sloboda, The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music. Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s generative theory of tonal music is also premised on Gestalt theory.

74. Schellenberg, “Expectancy in Melody.” Schellenberg found that the expectation of pitch reversal held for adults but not for infants, which suggests that this “universal” is not hardwired. He suggests that the exaggerated prosody with which caregivers often speak to infants may delay their acquisition of this expectation for song. A study by Paul von Hippel and David Huron, “Why Do Skips Precede Reversals? The Effect of Tessitura on Melodic Structure,” showed that composers only tend to reverse pitch when it is approaching the edge of tessitura (the predominantly used area within a particular vocal part), quite sensibly in that a singer cannot continue indefinitely in the same direction. Huron refers to this phenomenon as “melodic regression.” Nevertheless, listeners expect large skips to be followed by steps in the opposite direction regardless of the relation of the skip to tessitura. Huron speculates that listeners overgeneralize from the cases in which skips occur near the median pitch of a vocal range. See Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 80–85.

75. Diana Deutsch has suggested that we tend to misremember random skips, which might again suggest that the widespread structural tendencies of music are a consequence of the constraining influence of the limitations of memory. See Deutsch, “Facilitation by Repetition in Recognition Memory for Tonal Pitch”; and Deutsch, “Delayed Pitch Comparisons and the Principle of Proximity.”

76. For a discussion of this and other Gestalt principles in connection with music, see Lipscomb, “Cognitive Organization of Musical Sound,” 145–50.

77. See EMM, 92. Both Meyer and Lerdahl and Jackendoff cite Koffka’s original formulation of the Law of Prägnanz: “Psychological organization will always be as ‘good’ as the prevailing conditions allow. In this definition the term ‘good’ is undefined. It embraces such properties as regularity, similarity, simplicity, and others.” Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 110. See EMM, 86, and Lerdahl and Jackendoff, 304. Meyer includes this law among the principles that structure our musical expectations, although he grants that deviations occur. On his account, deviation from expectations occasion affect; so none of the principles that establish our expectations are satisfied in every case. Dowling and Harwood insist that good continuation can be overridden by other patterning principles, such as repeated notes, proximity, or similarity of timbre. Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 158–59. For example, we tend to track the timbre of a violin and to hear the movement of this timbre to be part of the same voice in a texture, even if the violin does not continue to follow a pattern in a fashion that conforms to our expectations.

78. MLB, 170–73. Patel’s coinvestigators were John R. Iversen and Kengo Ohgushi. The study, “Perception of Nonlinguistic Rhythmic Stimuli by American and Japanese listeners,” appeared in the Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Acoustics, Kyoto, Japan, 2004. For a popular account of the study, John R. Iversen and Kengo Ohgushi, “How the Mother Tongue Influences the Musical Ear,” see http://www.acoustics.org/press/152nd/iversen_ patel_ohgushi.html.

79. Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 95.

80. See ibid., 99.

81. I am assuming here and in the remainder of my discussion that the music under discussion is human music. I suspect that we interpret animal music as the result of movement, too, but my focus here is our grounds for recognizing something familiar in music from foreign human cultures.

82. In other words, even when sequentially performed, tones that form dissonant intervals will be heard as being in a dissonant relation to each other and will therefore imply a degree of instability that we expect to be resolved by means of subsequent consonance.

83. See Francès, The Perception of Music, 78, and Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 86.

84. MLB, 199 and 199n.

85. Interestingly, some societies reverse the direction of the correlation, among them the Greeks, the Jews, and the Arabs. See Sachs, The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West, 69–70, and Francès, The Perception of Music, 279. Both Sachs and Francès speculate that these correlations may have stemmed from the observation that long strings, that is, strings that extended “higher,” produced the tones that we would call “lower,” or that the “higher” status accorded to men made their voices “higher” by association.

86. See Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 275–76.

87. Our perception of spatial distances is not as universal as it might seem; we learn how to use auditory cues to perceive distances by experience. Feld observes that the rainforest context of Kaluli life has an impact on the acoustic features of the environment.

Lack of visual depth cues couple with the ambiguities of different vegetation densities and ever-present sounds (like water hiss) to make depth often sensed as height moving outward, dissipating as it moves. . . . Even though I was aware of psychological evidence that humans are better at horizontal than vertical sound localization, and often subjectively sense high tones to be higher in space than they in fact are . . . I was acoustically disoriented in the forest for months. Kaluli laughed hysterically the first times they saw me look up to hear a sound that was deep, whether high or low to the ground. (Feld, “Aesthetics as Iconicity of Style, or ‘Lift-up-over Sounding,’” 88–89.)

88. Nussbaum, The Musical Representation, 21.

89. Sloboda, The Musical Mind, 259.

90. For a discussion of pitch hierarchies, which can be used to distinguish pitches that are structural from those that are ornamental, see MLB, 201–2.

91. See London, Hearing in Time, 4. London argues that musical meter, an anticipatory schema that we impose, is a specific case of entrainment behavior, an outgrowth of our practice in entraining from our early childhood (6 and 12).

92. Benzon notes that our nearest primate relatives seem not to be able to do this. See Beethoven’s Anvil, 27–28. Benzon also notes the study by Néda et al., “The Sound of Many Hands Clapping,” which demonstrates that applause recurrently attains synchronization, which breaks up and then is restored (except at high frequencies). The nonsynchronized hand clapping was louder and at approximately twice the frequency.

93. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §84, 139.

94. “Polythetic” is a technical phenomenological term, which Schutz defines as “step by step.” See Schutz, “Making Music Together,” 114–15.

95. Ibid., 118.

96. Repp, “Diversity and Commonality in Music Performance”; see also Patel’s discussion in MLB, 114–15. This may, however, be an overgeneralization from a single case.

97. MLB, 47.

98. Ibid., 141.

CHAPTER 4

1. The first two paragraphs of this chapter were also published in Higgins, “Musical Education for Peace,” 389.

2. Weintraub, Silent Night, 26–27 and 30. My thanks to Marilyn Maxwell for drawing my attention to this book.

3. Ibid., 37.

4. Lerdahl and Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, 293.

5. Nettl, “On the Question of Universals,” 5.

6. Davies, Musical Works and Performances, 22n.

7. See Harwood, “Universals in Music,” 526. Dowling and Harwood point out that this tendency reflects the Gestalt principle of proximity, and that in experiments “violations of the proximity rule . . . led to patterns that were difficult to follow” (Music Cognition, 155–57).

8. Meyer, “A Pride of Prejudices; or, Delight in Diversity,” 284 and 284n.

9. See McAllester, “Some Thoughts on ‘Universals’ in World Music,” 379; Nettl, “An Ethnomusicologist Contemplates Universals in Musical Sound and Musical Culture,” 468; Benzon, Beethoven’s Anvil, 140. Lerdahl and Jackendoff point out that systems with a tonic sometimes also employ “a secondary point of stability” (A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, 295). They cite Indian ragas and Torah chant as examples. See also Erickson, “A Perceptual Substrate for Tonal Centering?” Erickson suggests that the evidence of traditional “neighbor” ornaments that circle specific tones reflect a tendency toward centering. He also suggests that the phenomenon of melodic fission may result in a tendency toward centering, since recurrent skips often result in the impression of two melody lines instead of one.

10. Nattiez, however, finds this putative universal so vague as to be almost meaningless. See “Under What Conditions Can One Speak of the Universals of Music?,” 98.

11. See Sloboda, The Musical Mind, 253; Lerdahl and Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, 295; and Sloboda and Juslin, “Psychological Perspective on Music and Emotion,” 92.

12. Nettl, “On the Question of Universals,” 5.

13. Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 76–77.

14. McAllester, “Some Thoughts on ‘Universals’ in World Music”; Nettl, “On the Question of Universals,” 5.

15. Brown, Merker, and Wallin, “An Introduction to Evolutionary Musicology,” 14. See also Gabrielsson and Lindström, “The Influence of Musical Structure on Emotional Expression,” 226. They note Imberty’s study that suggests that “high formal complexity combined with high dynamism means formal disintegration and expression of anxiety and aggressiveness.” They refer to Imberty, Entendre la musique.

16. Nettl, “On the Question of Universals,” 5.

17. Sloboda, The Musical Mind, 258. See also Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 239.

18. Brown, Merker, and Wallin, “An Introduction to Evolutionary Musicology,” 14. See also Sloboda, The Musical Mind, 259. Lerdahl and Jackendoff (98) point out that Alice Singer’s study of the complex rhythms of Macedonian and Bulgarian folk music, for example, analyzes all of them in terms of units of twos and threes. See Singer, “The Metrical Structure of Macedonian Dance.”

19. Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility, 47.

20. See MLB, 88. In Western music theory, the octave, the fifth, and the fourth are described as “perfect” intervals.

21. See Simonton, “Emotion and Composition in Classical Music: Historiometric Perspectives,” 214.

22. My thanks to Ron Grant for encouraging me to speculate about the basis for this “law.”

23. Harwood, “Universals in Music,” 528.

24. Nettl, “An Ethnomusicologist Contemplates Musical Universals,” 469.

25. Mâche, “The Necessity of and Problems with a Universal Musicology,” 475. Mâche considers pentatonic polyphony on a drone to be one of the few structural characteristics of human music that one does not find in any animal sonic production.

26. Van Damme, “Universality and Cultural Particularity in Visual Aesthetics,” 258.

27. Ibid., 274.

28. Ibid., 274n.

29. Malm, Music Cultures of the Pacific, the Near East, and Asia, 33.

30. See Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 37.

31. My thanks to Stephen Davies and Susan Pratt Walton for their explanations of the desired vocal qualities in these two cultures. See also MLB, 90. Patel points out that Bulgarian music shows a preference for “rough-sounding intervals such as the second,” which are featured in some of its polyphonic vocal music.

32. Walker, Musical Beliefs, 45.

33. Ibid., 45–46.

34. Intituta Partum de Modo Psallendi Sive Cantandi, in Scriptores Ecclesiastici de Musica Sacra Potissimum, I, 5a, as cited in Harrán, Word-Tone Relations in Musical Thought, 45–46.

35. Lomax, “Folk Song Style,” 933 and 936.

36. See Lomax, Cantometrics: An Approach to the Anthropology of Music. Lomax considered more than 3,000 songs from 233 cultures. He coded the songs on the basis of thirty-seven features.

37. Lomax, “Song Structure and Social Structure,” 228–29.

38. Lomax, “Folk Song Style,” 950.

39. Lomax, “Song Structure and Social Structure,” 241.

40. Ibid., 237 and 239–40.

41. Feld, “Sound Structure as Social Structure,” 384.

42. Ibid., 385.

43. Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 229. They point out that Lomax, with Norman Berkowitz, made new cantometric studies, concluding that many of the relationships did not seem to be as universal as the initial studies had suggested, but that the cohesion of social singing did remain correlated with general social cohesion as did constricted voice and sexual repressiveness. See Lomax and Berkowitz, “The Evolutionary Taxonomy of Culture.” See also Erickson, “Tradition and Evolution in Song Style.”

44. See Erickson, “Tradition and Evolution in Song Style.”

45. Feld, “Sound Structure as Social Structure,” 406.

46. Van Damme, “Universality and Cultural Particularity in Visual Aesthetics,” 282. For an extended defense of this suggestion, see Van Damme, Beauty in Context.

47. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1:258–59.

48. Emotional response to the melody may also have figured in this selection. Huron analyzes the melody of the “Ode to Joy” as involving a temporal deviation from what is predictable when the fourth phrase begins prematurely, a quarter note before the downbeat, right after the downward leap that ends the third phrase. The most common response he has gotten in an informal poll in which he has asked people how they characterize this moment has been that it is thrilling. See Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 278–79.

49. Meyer sees musical divergence as inherent to the hierarchical character of music: “One of the consequences of the discontinuity of hierarchies is that universal, high-level principles are invariably realized through lower-level, cultural constraints” (“A Pride of Prejudices; or, Delight in Diversity,” 277).

50. See, for example, Lomax, “Appeal for Cultural Equity,” 125–39; and Feld, “From Schizophonia to Schismogenesis,” especially 286–88.

51. An example of transplanted music that has taken on local values, at least in terms of the lyrics, is Tanzanian hip-hop. Alex Perullo indicates the many ways in which hip-hop in Dar es Salaam has taken on local characteristics, rejecting sexual or violent references, favoring more moralistic messages of concern in the society, such as warnings about AIDS and the harms of domestic violence. See “‘Here’s a Little Something Local,’” 257–58 and 264–67. Perullo concludes, “To say that the West homogenizes non-Western cultures with its dominance of cultural forms is to lack understanding of local-level mediation that occurs as part of daily confluences of global and local trends” (268).

52. See, for example, Marl Young, Joint Testimony of Buddy Collette and Marl Young to the Hearing on the Preservation of Jazz in California, sponsored by the Legislative Black Caucus of the California Legislature, October 11, 1991. http//www.csulb.edu/~caljazz/about/LBC_Hearing/lbch01.html.

53. Turino, Music as Social Life, 46. “Wide” tuning separates tones in a given interval at a greater distance than is acoustically standard.

54. Ibid., 78. See also 91.

55. See ibid., 188.

56. Ibid., 31.

57. Cook, Music, Imagination, and Culture, 1–9. Cook denies that we can “reasonably demand that music must, by definition, yield all its meaning in perception” (8). But he does emphasize the importance of perception. “Some degree of meaningful or gratifying perceptual engagement with it is a prerequisite if one is to approach it as music at all” (9).

58. Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression, 326–27.

59. Idiophones are instruments, such as rattles, cymbals, bells, and scrapers, that produce a sound just by vibrating their basic material (wood or metal, for example).

60. The mbira is constructed with metallic attachments to the keys, so that rattling, metallic sounds coincide with the tones that are played. My thanks to Stephen Davies for this example. Turino considers such effort to create buzzy sounds to be a manifestation of a preference for dense textures, a characteristic of participatory musical throughout the world. See Music as Social Life, 46.

61. See Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 124 and 221. See also MLB, 22; Bartlett, Remembering, 85, 199–201, 312–13; Neisser, Cognition and Reality; and Mandler, Mind and Body, 55–65. Mandler points out that schemata operate in interaction with input from the environment but also select the evidence.

62. Perlman and Krumhansl, “An Experimental Study of Internal Interval Standards in Javanese and Western Musicians.”

63. Lynch and Eilers, “Children’s Perception of Native and Nonnative Musical Scales,” 122.

64. Ibid., 121–32. Meyer points out that inculcated templates play a role in our assessment of when tones are structural and when they are inflected for expressive purposes.

Once the tonal relationships of Western music have been learned as categories of perception, if the third step of the major scale is gradually lowered, what we perceive is an increasingly out-of-tune major third until, at some point, a categorical shift occurs and we perceive a minor third. Were it not for categorical perception, the “blue note” would long since have lost its color. (“A Pride of Prejudices; or, Delight in Diversity,” 289)

65. Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 215.

66. I wish to thank Stephen Slawek for this example.

67. See Wade, Music in India, 119.

68. Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 213.

69. For an example, see Schneider, “Sound, Pitch, and Scale,” 512–14. Schneider points out that not only pitch but also timbre is “a multi-dimensional attribute of complex sounds,” with similar cognitive challenges.

70. See Trainor, McDonald, and Alain, “Automatic and Controlled Processing of Melodic Contour and Interval Information Measured by Electrical Brain Activity.” See also MLB, 27.

71. Hopkins, “Aural Thinking,” 154.

72. See Lomax, “Song Structure and Social Structure”; Feld, “Sound Structure as Social Structure”; and Keil, Tiv Song.

73. Forster, A Passage to India, 16.

74. To the extent that fiction writers can convincingly get inside the minds of foreign characters, imaginative world-traveling across cultures is evidently possible, though the test would be whether a member of that culture found the presentation convincing. For a discussion of imaginative “world-traveling,” see Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception.”

75. MLB, 302.

76. See Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 207. The study he refers to is David Perrot and Robert Gjerdingen, “Scanning the Dial: An Exploration of Factors in the Identification of Musical Style,” a paper presented at the Society for Music Perception and Cognition Conference, Evanston, Illinois.

77. See Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 209.

78. Ibid., 213.

79. See ibid., 215.

80. Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression, 328.

81. Cf. Davies, Musical Works and Performances, 235.

82. The studies are Lynch and Eilers, “Children’s Perception of Native and Nonnative Musical Scales”; and Lynch, Short, and Chua, “Contributions of Experience to the Development of Musical Processing in Infancy.” Trainor and Trehub mounted several criticisms, including the argument that because they used melodies at the same absolute pitch, the experimenters were unable to tell whether the infants were attending to intervals or absolute pitch levels. See “A Comparison of Infants’ and Adults’ Sensitivity to Western Musical Structure,” 396. See also MLB, 83.

83. MLB, 85.

84. Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 47–48 and 53–55.

85. Ibid., 55. Patel supports the idea that it is possible to gain some appreciation of music from another culture “very quickly.” See MLB, 300.

86. Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression, 329. See also p. 238n, where Davies remarks that “differences in musical styles of cultures” as well as

other relativities might . . . make the expressive character of music from an unfamiliar society opaque. For example, it may be that different cultures do not always associate the same emotions with the same degrees of tension, or it may be that expressions of emotion play roles, or occupy places, other than those with which we are familiar.

87. Nettl contends that every culture associates some music with words: “Nowhere do we find cultures whose singing is completely without words, without poetry” (“On the Question of Universals,” 5).

88. Harwood, “Universals in Music,” 529.

89. Rhoma Irama, “Sahabat,” Smithsonian Folkways CD Music of Indonesia 2: Indonesian Popular Music: Kroncong, Dangdut, and Langgam Jawa (SF-40056). See the translated lyrics included with the compact disc.

CHAPTER 5

1. Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 30.

2. Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, 18.

3. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 62e.

4. Adorno, “Music, Language, and Composition,” 401–14.

5. For a thoughtful discussion of the various levels on which music can be meaningful, see Koopman and Davies, “Musical Meaning in a Broader Perspective,” 261–74.

6. See Brust, “Music and the Neurologist,” 183.

7. Peretz, “Brain Specialization for Music,” 194. She refers to Peretz, “Auditory Agnosia”; and Polster and Rose, “Disorders of Auditory Processing.”

8. Specifically, the superior temporal plane and the Heschl gyrus are activated by both, as well as many parts of the primary and secondary auditory areas. Brain lateralization for language and music is no longer held to be more or less absolute, as it once was. Instead, musical processing is recognized to involve multiple components and to depend on both hemispheres. See Zatorre, “Neural Specializations for Tonal Processing,” 237. See also Parsons, “Exploring the Functional Neuroanatomy of Music Performance Perception, and Comprehension”; Besson and Schön, “Comparison between Language and Music,” 274; Sergent et al., “Distributed Neural Network Underlying Musical Sight-Reading and Keyboard Performance.” Patel contends that the hemispheres cooperate, citing evidence of “strong functional coupling between left posterior hemisphere and right hemisphere regions during the perception of melody-like sequences” (“A New Approach to the Cognitive Neuroscience of Melody,” 341).

Sergent et al., “Distributed Neural Network Underlying Musical Sight-Reading and Keyboard Performance.”

9. See Pinker, How the Mind Works, 529; Gould and Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm”; Miller, “Evolution of Human Music through Sexual Selection”; Falk, “Hominid Brain Evolution and the Origins of Music,” 213; Fitch, “The Biology and Evolution of Music”; Cross, “Music and Cognitive Evolution”; MLB, 355–415; and Davies, “Music, Fire, and Evolution.”

10. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, 19.

11. Strictly, auf and zu are separable prefixes in this context, but without the verbs of which they are a part. Standing alone, they sound like prepositions.

12. See Lidov, Is Language a Music?

13. Ibid., 14.

14. Sloboda, The Musical Mind, 17.

15. Jacques Derrida argues polemically in Of Grammatology that spoken language is not primary, but instead that written language is the original case. Iterability is the essence of language, he claims, which means that the potential for citation is part of its essence. This is uncontroversial if what is meant is that repeatable units are essential to language as we understand it. However, it is hardly necessary that one etch the repeatable units in order to have this potential, although as soon as one has such reiterable units, it does seem that one has therewith the possibility of associating them with specific written shapes. What Derrida actually demonstrates is a feature that language has in common with music as it is practiced throughout the world.

16. Swain, Musical Languages, 11. Cf. Bright, “Language and Music: Areas for Cooperation.”

17. See MLB, 74–75. The study he cites is Best and Avery, “Left-Hemisphere Advantage for Click Consonants Is Determined by Linguistic Significance and Experience.”

18. See Harris, “From Phoneme to Morpheme.” After three-minute familiarization periods, the infant subjects in this study were able to differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar sequences of tones, as indicated by differences in listening time. This was judged on the basis of how long it took for the infant to look away from the speaker from which the “tone language” emerged. See also Saffran, Aslin, and Newport, “Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants”; and Saffran et al., “Statistical Learning of Tone Sequences by Human Infants and Adults.”

19. Drake and Bertrand, “The Quest for Universals in Temporal Processing,” 25–28.

20. See McAdams and Matzkin, “The Roots of Musical Variation in Perceptual Similarity and Invariance,” 90.

21. Francisco de Salinas (1513–1590) already expressed the importance of melodic contour in speech as well as music. See Salinas, De Musica, Libri Septem.

22. Falk, “Hominid Brain Evolution and the Origins of Music,” 204.

23. Juslin and Laukka, “Communication of Emotions in Vocal Expression and Music Performance,” 796.

24. Frick (in “Communicating Emotion”) refers to the importance of “prosodic contours.” Juslin refers to them as “expressive contours” (“Communicating Emotion in Musical Performance,” 317–20).

25. Brown, “The ‘Musilanguage’ Model of Music,” 289. Lidov complains that linguistics shortchanges “the feeling tones and gestural character of speech,” suggesting that the bias favors what is expressible in writing as the essence of language (Is Language a Music?, 3).

26. Juslin and Laukka, “Communication of Emotions in Vocal Expression and Music Performance,” 789.

27. Peretz, “Listen to the Brain,” 123.

28. MLB, 184.

29. See Nooteboom and Kruyt, “Accents, Focus Distribution, and Perceived Distribution of Given and New Information.”

30. See MLB, 186.

31. See Ratner, “Durational Cues Which Mark Clause Boundaries in Mother-Child Speech”; Hirsh-Pasek et al., “Clauses Are Perceptual Units for Young Infants”; and Morgan, From Simple Input to Complex Grammar, 20 and 111–28.

32. See Sloboda, The Musical Mind, 24.

33. Ibid., 25.

34. See MLB, 148.

35. See Sloboda, The Musical Mind, 23.

36. See Goodman, Languages of Art, 132. Goodman refers to the necessity of “character-indifference among the instances of each character,” which amounts to the demand that characters be perceived, or at least interpreted, as instances of a category. Lerdahl describes as a constraint on compositional grammars the principle that “the musical surface must be capable of being parsed into a sequence of discrete events.” Without this, he suggests, listeners have difficulty inferring the structure of what they hear. Cf. Swain, Musical Languages, 25.

37. The experiment is described and analyzed in Warren and Warren, “Auditory Illusions and Confusions.” See also Swain, Musical Languages, 13–14.

38. In this range, nerves appear to directly transmit frequencies of sound vibrations to the brain. From 200 to 20,000 Hz, the sine waves of various frequencies appear to excite different positions along the basilar membrane of the inner ear. Dowling and Harwood point out that this is the range in which human beings directly perceive periodicity. See Music Cognition, 29. They acknowledge, however, that the theory of different spectrums of place and periodicity mechanisms for pitch perception is not universally accepted. See p. 41.

39. Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 28. See also Tramo et al., “Neurobiology of Harmony Perception,” 134; and Houtsma and Goldstein, “The Central Origin of the Pitch of Complex Tones.”

40. In this and all cases of the missing fundamental, the harmonics heard must be fairly loud, and musical context can also make the impression of the fundamental more obvious. See Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 38–39.

41. Chinese in all its dialects has a large number of homophones because the standard word is a single syllable, and the same sound is typically connected with multiple characters. Auditors usually disambiguate spoken words by means of context.

42. For a further introductory discussion of the system of tones in Mandarin Chinese, see Pickle, “Written and Spoken Chinese,” 24–25.

43. Brown, “The ‘Musilanguage’ Model of Music Evolution,” 281. See also MLB, 42.

44. Brown, “The ‘Musilanguage’ Model of Music Evolution,” 282.

45. Ibid., 282; citing Thorsen, “Intonation Contours and Stress Group Patterns in Declarative Sentences of Varying Length in ASC Danish”; Thorsen, “Intonation Contours and Stress Group Patterns in Declarative Sentences of Varying Length: Supplementary Data”; Liberman and Pierrehumbert, “Intonational Invariance under Changes in Pitch Range and Length”; and Ladd and Terken, “Modeling Intra- and Inter-Speaker Pitch Range Variation.”

46. Brown, “The ‘Musilanguage’ Model of Music Evolution,” 282.

47. I wish to thank Eva Man (Man Kit-Wah) for the information she provided me about the Cantonese language.

48. Richman, “How Music Fixed ‘Nonsense’ into Significant Formulas,” 304. Besson and Schön (“Comparison between Language and Music”) point out that for both spoken language and music, “specific events are expected at specific times.” They also note that brain imaging studies “indicate that qualitatively similar processes seem to be responsible for temporal processing in language and music” (285), and that “similar brain areas were activated by temporal violations in both language and music” (287).

49. Richman, “How Music Fixed ‘Nonsense’ into Significant Formulas,” 303. He argues that phrasing that includes open-slot formulas was presupposed before language could evolve.

50. Huttenlocher and Burke, “Why Does Memory Span Increase with Age?”

51. Condon and Sander, “Synchrony Demonstrated between Movements of the Neonate and Adult Speech,” 456. See also Turino, Music as Social Life, 41–42. Breakdowns in movement synchrony with one’s own speech can be symptomatic of psychological disorders, including aphasia, autism, and schizophrenia. See Condon and Brosin, “Micro Linguistic-Kinesic Events in Schizophrenic Behavior.” See also Condon, “Multiple Response to Sound in Dysfunctional Children”; and Condon, “Communication: Rhythm and Structure.”

52. Gregory, “Sounds of Power and Deference.” See also Richman, “How Music Fixed ‘Nonsense’ into Significant Formulas,” 305; Condon and Sander, “Synchrony Demonstrated between Movements of the Neonate and Adult Speech”; Condon and Ogston, “Sound Film Analysis of Normal and Pathological Behavior Patterns”; and Condon and Brosin, “Micro Linguistic-Kinesic Events in Schizophrenic Behavior.” Feld observes that rhythmic expectations for speech vary across cultures. The Kaluli, he points out, overlap each other’s spoken statements, just as they do each other’s musical phrases, and they teach their children to participate in conversation by adhering to the same pattern. Feld, “Aesthetics as Iconicity of Style, or ‘Lift-up-over Sounding,’” 78–83.

53. See Collins, “Emotion as Key to Reconstructing Social Theory.” See also Collins, “Toward Neo-Meadian Sociology of Mind.”

54. Condon and Sander, “Synchrony Demonstrated between Movements of the Neonate and Adult Speech,” 459. They have also shown that such synchronization occurs also among newborns, and that this remained so when language varied (see 461). Interestingly, disconnected vowel sounds did not result in the same degree of correspondence between movement and sound as does “ordinary rhythmic speech.”

55. Cf. Lerdahl, “The Sounds of Poetry Viewed as Music,” 414.

56. Ibid., 416–17.

57. Brown, “The ‘Musilanguage’ Model of Music Evolution,” 273. Swain points out that syntax is not only a means “of organizing musical information into hierarchical orders”; it is also used as “the control of tension and resolution, which shapes not only the essential musical dynamic, the metaphor of motion, but also the very character of every musical language” (Musical Languages, 172).

58. Swain, Musical Languages, 11.

59. Saffran, “Mechanisms of Musical Memory in Infancy,” 32. See also Fernald, “Intonation and Communicative Intent in Mothers’ Speech to Infants: Is the Melody the Message?”; and Mehler et al., “A Precursor of Language Acquisition in Young Infants.”

60. Papousek, “Music in Infancy Research: Biological and Cultural Origins of Early Musicality,” 43. Babies seem to mentally represent and recall music in very precise form, suggesting that flexibility in recognizing similarity in music arises only gradually. However, babies do recognize familiar melodies performed in a different key. See Saffran, “Mechanisms of Musical Memory in Infancy,” 38. See also Trehub, “Human Processing Predispositions and Musical Universals,” 431; Trehub and Trainor, “Listening Strategies in Infancy”; and Trehub, Thorpe, and Trainor, “Infants’ Perception of Good and Bad Melodies.”

61. Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 146, referring to Chang and Trehub, “Auditory Processing of Relational Information by Young Infants,” 324–31; replicated in a more sophisticated fashion in Trehub, Bull, and Thorpe, “Infants’ Perception of Melodies: The Role of Melodic Contour.”

62. “Motherese” appears to be a culturally widespread phenomenon. However, Elinor Ochs and Bambi B. Shieffelin (“Language Acquisition and Socialization”) have argued that it is not truly universal, in that some cultures do not direct much speech to young infants.

63. Trehub, “Human Processing Predispositions and Musical Universals,” 437. She cites Fernald, “Intonation and Communicative Intent in Mothers’ Speech to Infants”; Papousek, Papousek, and Symmes, “The Meanings of Melodies in Motherese in Tone and Stress Languages.”

64. Note the Teletubbies, the characters on the BBC’s series Teletubbies, BBC/Ragdoll Limited. The Teletubbies have been criticized for not articulating clearly; but the emphasis on musical characteristics of speech to the expense of articulational clarity is in keeping with the features of infant-directed speech, or “motherese,” which are ubiquitous among adults addressing babies.

65. See Fernald, “Intonation and Communicative Intent in Mothers’ Speech to Infants,” 1498–99.

66. I will discuss this idea in more detail in conjunction with Daniel Stern’s notion of “vitality affects” in chapters 6 and 8.

67. Condon and Sander, “Synchrony Demonstrated between Movements of the Neonate and Adult Speech,” 462.

68. Mehler et al., “A Precursor of Language Acquisition in Young Infants.” One of the experiments ruled out that the infants were responding to the specific spectra of the sounds used in the languages to which they were exposed. Cf. Ramus et al., “Language Discrimination by Human Newborns and by Cotton-Top Tamarin Monkeys,” which indicates that primates can distinguish between utterances in two different languages on the basis of rhythmic difference.

69. They cite DeCaspar and Spence, “Prenatal Maternal Speech Influences Newborns’ Perception of Speech Sounds”; Querleu and Renard, “Les perceptions auditives du fetus humain”; and Vince et al., “The Sound Environment of Foetal Sheep.” See also Abrams et al., “Fetal Music Perception”; and Abrams and Gerhardt, “Some Aspects of the Foetal Sound Environment.”

70. Mehler et al., “A Precursor of Language Acquisition in Young Infants,” 175.

71. Banse and Scherer, “Acoustic Profiles in Vocal Emotion Expression.”

72. Fernald, “Intonation and Communicative Intent in Mothers’ Speech to Infants.”

73. The Neo-Futurists, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, first performed on December 2, 1988. The play consists of thirty plays in sixty minutes. The segment I mention appeared on “20 Acts in 60 Minutes,” This American Life, Serial 241, produced by Chicago Public Radio, distributed by Public Radio International, first broadcast on July 11, 2003. For more on the Neo-Futurists, see www.neofuturists.org.

74. See Bright, “Language and Music,” 26–27. Bright draws his information on this effect in Navajo music from Herzog, “Speech Melody and Primitive Music.”

75. Bright, “Language and Music,” 27.

76. Koelsch et al., “Music, Language and Meaning.”

77. Ibid., 302.

78. Ibid., 303.

79. MLB, 50–51.

80. See Albert, Sparks, and Helm, “Melodic Intonation Therapy for Aphasia”; Sacks, Musicophilia, 214 and 218–23; and Brust, “Music and the Neurologist,” 183.

81. Falk, “Hominid Brain Evolution and the Origins of Music,” 204; citing Albert, Sparks, and Helm, “Melodic Intonation Therapy for Aphasia,” 130–31.

82. Seeger, “Reflections upon a Given Topic,” 398.

83. Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, 6. See also p. 106 for a discussion of the role of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s account of language in fortifying the analogy.

84. See Austin, How to Do Things with Words.

85. Bernstein, The Unanswered Question. Indeed, Bernstein explicitly sets out to “investigate musical universality” (8). He takes there to be three grounds for claiming that music is universal: (1) the acoustic properties of sound that it utilizes, (2) what he sees as a universal musical grammar, and (3) music’s symbolization of affective existence, which he takes to be a universal human endowment.

86. See ibid., 55–56 and 67.

87. It may be worth noting that much of the terminology used to describe music is originally derived from grammar and rhetoric. See Harrán, Word-Tone Relations in Musical Thought, 2. See also 48–49, 226, and 285.

88. Lerdahl and Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, 13. See also 281.

89. Lidov criticizes the emphasis on disjunctive segments in Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s theory in his “Our Time with the Druids,” 104–21. His use of the druid image in connection with the tree structures of that theory is borrowed from Peter Child. See Lidov, Is Language a Music?, 81.

90. For an analysis of the various types of semiotic theories of music, see Tarasti, A Theory of Musical Semiotics, 3–58.

91. See Barthes, Image Music Text; and Nattiez, Music and Discourse.

92. See Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By.

93. London, “Musical and Linguistic Speech Acts.” Lakoff and Johnson use the convention of capitalizing all letters in the words that label basic conceptual metaphors.

94. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 534. Pinker does not spell out the mechanisms of the way music “tickles” us, but he does mention its connection with (1) our faculty for language (with which music can combine); (2) our analysis of auditory scenes (which makes us associate strings of sounds with particular soundmakers); (3) emotional calls (which musical inflections resemble); (4) habitat selection (in that sound helps us determine which habitats are unsafe or changing); (5) motor control (given that music and our movement are both associated with rhythm); and (6) “something else,” since the previous five do not add to up to an explanation of “how the whole is more than the sum of its parts.” The vagueness of (6) reveals how little interested Pinker is in giving a thorough explanation of music’s role in human experience.

95. Ibid., 528.

96. James, The Principles of Psychology, 2:627.

97. Santayana, The Life of Reason, or the Phases of Human Progress, 4:15.

98. See Darwin, The Descent of Man, 569. See also Granit, The Purposive Brain, 13.

99. See also Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, 191.

100. See, for example, Davies, “Life Is a Passacaglia.”

101. Carterette and Kendall see this as a reason for denying that speech is music. “Music is temporally organized sound and silence that is areferentially communicative within a context. In contrast, speech is not music because it points outside itself” (“Comparative Music Perception and Cognition,” 726).

102. Henson, “The Language of Music,” 238–39.

103. Raffman, Language, Music, and Mind, 41 and 53–55.

104. Molino, “Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Music and Language,” 170.

105. Brown, “The ‘Musilanguage’ Model of Music Evolution,” 284. Swain, Musical Languages, 173.

106. McFee, “Meaning and the Art-Status of ‘Music Alone,’” 32.

107. Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, 173–74.

108. See Hamilton, Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language, 160. Hamilton cites Hoffmann, Kierkegaard, Novalis, Wackenroder, Tieck, Jean Paul, and others.

109. Hoffmann, “The Poet and the Composer,” 48.

110. Felix Mendelssohn, Letter to Marc André Souchay; Berlin, October 5, 1842, cited by Cooke, The Language of Music, 12. Cf. Martha Nussbaum: “Even when the music is accompanied by a text or program,” she asserts, “the music . . . may be more definite in certain ways than the text, making the emotional movement precise in a way that the text by itself does not” (Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 277). Cook and Dibben point out that Mendelssohn’s view was influenced by E. T. A. Hoffmann, who claims that music offered access to a transcendent realm in contrast to the circumstances of everyday modern life. Cook and Dibben, “Musicological Approaches to Emotion,” 48: “Seen in this light . . . the very lack of specificity that formerly consigned [music] . . . to a subordinate role was now construed as an infinite suggestiveness.” See also Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 233.

111. For a discussion of the interpretation of both language and music as representational systems that articulate the objective order of reality, see Bowie, Music Philosophy, and Modernity, 51–54. Bowie observes, “For eighteenth-century representational theories there is always a verbal equivalent of what music says, the apparently non-representational aspect of music being catered for by an underlying representational or mimetic conception of language as that which can render explicit what is only implicit in the music.”

112. Ibid., 53.

113. Hamilton, Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language. The idea that language is deficient because it is systematically providing categories and concepts to use in ordering our experience strikes many critics as bizarre. Cf. Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression, 154–62. He remarks, “The oddity consists in finding fault in the fact that language does not do a job that it is not designed to (and should not) perform” (156). He approvingly cites William Kennick’s objection: “Works of art may serve as vehicles of illumination and enlightenment, but they do not do so by saying the unsayable, communicating the incommunicable. In so far as they say anything at all . . . what works of art say can be said in words” (Kennick, “Art and the Ineffable,” 320). Kennick’s paradigm for “saying” is obviously speech (although it is unclear whether or not he takes prosody to add anything to linguistic meaning); thus it would seem virtually analytic that anything that can be “said” can be said in language. Malcolm Budd argues that even if music had unique power to communicate a larger number of nuances of emotion, this would not demonstrate that the details communicated are of particular value, a point with which Davies concurs. See Budd, “Music and the Communication of Emotion,” 129–38; and Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression, 158 and 162.

I am inclined to think that much of this debate is itself an indication of the music as language metaphor leading us astray; it provokes the expectation that music and language are communicative structures of the same sort and thus potentially in a kind of rivalry. Although the critics of the romantic view seem correct in thinking that the adequacy of language should be assessed on the basis of whether it does what it is designed to do, I think the Romantics are right to celebrate music’s unique power to do something else, namely, to communicate nuances of feeling. The value of communicating such nuances is not the special importance of the “message” conveyed but the intimacy that is established by virtue of sharing feelings of such specificity.

114. Bernstein claims that both serialists and expressionists aimed at greater semantic richness than their predecessors. See Bernstein, The Unanswered Question, 270 and 149–53. He makes ingenious comparisons between musical figures and figures of speech.

115. Cf. Pound, “Vers libre and Arnold Dometsch,” 437: “Poetry is a composition of words set to music. . . . The amount or quality of the music may, and does, vary; but poetry withers and ‘dries out’ when it leaves music, or at least an imagined music, too far behind it.”

116. Raffman, Language, Music, and Mind.

117. The musical grammar she has in mind is that articulated by Lerdahl and Jackendoff in A Generative Theory of Tonal Music.

118. Swain points out that every individual has a unique accent and voiceprint, and suggests that this gives speech “acoustic equivalents of octaves and instrumental colors in music” (Musical Languages, 10).

119. Music conjoined with words can, of course, involve all the speech acts of which words are capable.

120. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 151.

121. London, “Musical and Linguistic Speech Acts,” 57.

122. Tolstoy, War and Peace, 222.

123. Searle, Speech Acts, 44.

124. London, “Musical and Linguistic Speech Acts,” 56.

125. Ibid., 61.

126. Casablanca. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Warner Brothers, 1942.

127. Ernoff, “A Cajun Poetics of Loss and Longing,” 287–88. The reference to Dennis McGee is from Savoy, Cajun Music, 56.

128. Ernoff, “A Cajun Poetics of Loss and Longing,” 288.

129. Staal, “Mantras and Bird Songs,” 550. The reference is to Lorenz, “Über die Enstehung auslösender ‘Zeremonien,’” 9–13.

130. Staal, “Mantras and Bird Songs,” 555.

131. Ibid., 556.

132. See Turino, Music as Social Life, 9 and 237.

133. See Blacking, How Musical Is Man?, 237; and Merriam, The Anthropology of Music, 221.

134. Cross, “Music, Cognition, Culture, and Evolution,” 46.

135. Ibid., 51–52.

136. One situation in which such multiple meanings occur is that of music that carries disguised political messages. The music of the Aboriginal Australians is also polysemic, encoding knowledge appropriate for different levels of maturity in the same songs as well as providing maps. See Ellis, Aboriginal Music, 17, 89, and 129.

137. Swain, Musical Languages, 48 and 174.

138. Lidov, Is Language a Music?, 10.

139. Feld, “Communication, Music, and Speech about Music,” 8.

140. Ibid., 8.

141. Cf. the reported case of Sydney Morgenbesser’s refutation of a speaker who claimed that although double negatives made a positive, double affirmatives did not make a negative. Morgenbesser’s response was to say “Yah-yah” in a tone that conveyed complete dismissal. My thanks to Stephen Davies for reminding me of the relevance of this story to my point here.

CHAPTER 6

1. Proust, Swann’s Way, in Remembrance of Things Past, 1:36.

2. “Idiopathic synesthesia” is not my coinage. The term is used widely.

3. See Wheeler and Cutsforth, “Synaesthesia and Meaning,” 361–84.

4. Photisms can also appear that are not patches of color per se, but in this case the phenomenon would not be aptly called “colored hearing.”

5. For an account of the variety of musical idiopathic synesthesia, see Sacks, Musicophilia, 165–83.

6. Marks, Hammeal, and Bornstein, Perceiving Similarity and Comprehending Metaphor, 73. The studies cited are Marks, The Unity of the Senses; and Uttal, The Psychobiology of Sensory Coding.

7. Davies, “Philosophical Perspectives on Music’s Expressiveness,” 30.

8. Kant and Louis-Bertrand Castle are among the later investigators who pursued Aristotle’s suggestion that the mathematical principles of musical harmony might also be relevant to color harmony. See Gage, “Synaesthesia,” 4:349.

9. Aristotle, De Anima, 582.

10. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 229–30.

11. Hartshorne, The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation, 80. Along these same lines, Benzon contends that we feel the impact of a hammer on a nail head. See Benzon, Beethoven’s Anvil, 155.

12. Critchley, “Ecstatic and Synaesthetic Experiences during Musical Perception,” 222. See also 226.

13. Marks, The Unity of the Senses, 191.

14. They cite Gardner, “Metaphors and Modalities”; Winner, Rosentiel, and Gardner, “The Development of Metaphorical Understanding”; Vosniadou and Ortony, “The Emergence of the Literal-Metaphorical-Anomalous Distinction in Young Children”; and Silberstein et al., “Autumn Leaves and Old Photographs.”

15. Marks, Hammeal, and Bornstein, Perceiving Similarity and Comprehending Metaphor, 84.

16. Marks, “On Colored-Hearing Synaesthesia,” 326–27.

17. Cytowic, Synesthesia, 324.

18. Marks, Hammeal, and Bornstein, Perceiving Similarity and Comprehending Metaphor, 73–74. The study they cite is Lawson and Turkewitz, “Intersensory Function in Newborns: Effect of Sound on Visual Preferences.”

19. Marks, Hammeal, and Bornstein, Perceiving Similarity and Comprehending Metaphor, 73–74.

20. Stern characterizes the vitality affects as “amodal,” which may seem to run counter to my characterization of vitality affects as synesthetic. But his point is that vitality affects are not perceived by a particular sensory modality. Instead, infants perceive sensory qualities that are conjoined into an impression of a distinct dynamic agency. In this respect, vitality affects are a paradigm case of the sort of everyday synesthesia we have been considering.

21. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, 57–58.

22. Merlin Donald makes a similar point about the multimodal character of rhythmic sensitivity: “once rhythm is established, it may be played out with any motor modality, including the hands, feet, head, mouth, or the whole body. . . . Rhythm is therefore evidence of a central mimetic controller that can track various movement modalities simultaneously and in parallel.” See Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, 186.

23. Hornbostel, “The Unity of the Senses,” 83–89.

24. Wolf, “Emotional Dimensions of Ritual Music among the Kotas, a South Indian Tribe,” 379–422. It is perhaps worth noting that olfactory experiences are described in musical terms in the perfume industry, which describes the three basic components of a scent as high, middle, and low “notes.”

25. See Ellis, Aboriginal Music, 68. Ellis notes that the same word is used for “taste” and “melody” in Pitjantjatjara. See also Chatwin, The Songlines, 58.

26. See Feld, “Sound Structure as Social Structure,” 390–92. The Kaluli say that a song “hardens” when “poetic and performative structures” coalesce (390). On the involvement of multiple senses in aesthetic experience, see also Van Damme, Beauty in Context, 54, and Steager, “Where Does Art Begin on Puluwat?” MacDonald Critchley points out that multimodal terms for sense experience occur in a number of languages. See Critchley, “Ecstatic and Synaesthetic Experiences during Musical Perception,” 229.

27. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 10: §11, 520.

28. Cf. Davies, “Perceiving Music and Perceiving Musical Colors,” 33–34.

29. See also Clifton, Music as Heard, 137 and 288.

30. See Cytowic, Synesthesia, 307–8.

31. Boernstein also considered this connection to be fundamental to the experience of emotion (a view that seems to be given implicit support by those who consider emotion a stage of preparedness for fight or flight). See Boernstein, “Über die physiologischen Grundlagen des Wahrnehmens”; and Boernstein, “Perceiving and Thinking: Their Interrelationship and Organismic Organization.” According to Boernstein, thinking developed as a means for human beings to engage in “internalized movement; i.e., a movement is first anticipated, and then carried out” (in Cytowic, Synesthesia, 306–7). Synesthesia, accordingly, was an essential component in the development of the capacity to think. R. H. Wheeler goes further, arguing that all striving is based upon kinesthetic sensations and that kinesthesis is the core of what we call meaning. See “The Synaesthesia of a Blind Subject,” 360. Wheeler and his colleague T. S. Cutsworth also claimed that “synaesthesia is the act of perceiving, itself” (“Synaesthesia and Meaning,” 370). See also Dann, Bright Colors Falsely Seen, 84.

32. Cytowic, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, 161.

33. Cf. Seashore, Psychology of Music, 26.

34. Diana Raffman makes a case that is formally similar when she argues that the similarities between the structural features of music and language trick the mind into expecting semantics in music, just as it finds semantics in language. See Raffman, Language, Music, and Mind.

35. My thanks to Jeffrey Malpas for this point. Malpas suggested this idea in response to P. F. Strawson’s proposal in Individuals that we consider the nature of a world consisting only of sound. See Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, 56–80. Strawson, who grants that this is an example that does not correlate with our actual experience, raises the question of whether a sound and its repetition could be individuated in such a world. Malpas questions whether this thought experiment is even coherent, given the mutual reliance of the senses on each other (personal communication).

36. We should note, however, that Stern thinks musical experience returns most listeners to the psychological condition of the infant attending to vitality affects, as we shall consider further in chapter 8.

37. Clynes, Sentics, 18.

38. Lidov observes that Clynes’s findings have not been duplicated “by independent, professional researchers.” However, he reports that he acquired the equipment and did his own lab work, which more or less confirmed Clynes’s results. See Lidov, Is Language a Music?, 131.

39. Cf. Walker, Musical Beliefs, 100. For a discussion of individual variations in meanings ascribed to music, see Higgins, “Musical Idiosyncrasy and Perspectival Listening.”

40. See Sachs, Wellsprings of Music, 49–50. He cites a number of Western works that are mournful but written in major keys, as well as the many cultures in which the very notion of major or minor thirds (the intervals that differentiate major and minor chords) are inapplicable. Cf. Wittgenstein’s comment, “In Schubert the major often sounds sadder than the minor.” Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 84e.

41. Becker’s definition of trance is “a bodily event characterized by strong emotion, intense focus, the loss of the strong sense of self, usually enveloped by amnesia and a cessation of the inner language,” adding that it is “felt to be ineffable, not easily described or spoken of.” Becker, Deep Listeners, 43.

42. Becker points out that the peak of this phenomenon occurred from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. See ibid., 34.

43. Ibid., 113.

44. Ibid., 114–15.

45. That these associations are entrenched but learned is confirmed by considerable empirical work. See, for example, Gregory, Worral, and Sarge, “The Development of Emotional Responses to Music in Young Children.” Gregory and his colleagues point out that their sevenand eight-year-old subjects significantly correlated music in major keys with being happy and music in minor keys with being sad, while their three- and four-year-old subjects did not. This supports the idea that the association is learned and not innate. See also Clark and Teasdale, “Constraints on the Effects of Mood on Memory”; Kenealy, “Validation of a Music Mood Induction Procedure”; Kenealy, “Mood-State-Dependent Retrieval”; Martin and Metha, “Recall of Early Childhood Memories through Musical Mood Induction”; Parrott, “Mood Induction and Instructions to Sustain Moods”; Parrott and Sabini, “Mood and Memory under Natural Conditions”; Thompson, Schellenberg, and Husain, “Arousal, Mood, and the Mozart Effect”; Dalla Bella et al., “A Developmental Study of the Affective Value of Tempo and Mode in Music”; and Gerardi and Gerken, “The Development of Affective Response to Modality and Melodic Contour.”

46. Portions of the following paragraph have appeared previously in Higgins, “Musical Idiosyncrasy and Perspectival Listening,” 96.

47. Feld’s idea of “interpretive moves” is discussed toward the end of chapter 5.

48. For further discussion of musically sensitive idiosyncratic responses to music, see Higgins, “Musical Idiosyncrasy and Perspectival Listening.”

49. Koopman and Davies, “Musical Meaning in Broader Perspective.”

CHAPTER 7

1. See Cooke, The Language of Music, 33, where the passage from Beethoven is cited.

2. Ibid., 210.

3. Pratt, Music as the Language of Emotion, 26. See also 19.

4. The Shih Jing contains poems written 1000–600 BCE. See Schirokauer, A Brief History of Chinese Civilization, 21.

5. Legge, The She King, or the Book of Poetry, 4:34.

6. See Miller, Music and Song in Persia, 74. Safvat Drayush points out, however, that the manner of playing has more to do with the emotions expressed by a particular work than the generic mood associated with its dastgāh. See Miller, Music and Song in Persia, 22–23. See also During, “The System of Persian Music,” 77.

7. The ragas are scales, but more than scales. Harold S. Powers and Richard Widdess define a raga as “a continuum with scale and tune as its extremes,” and Lewis Rowell comments that it is “something more specific than an array of pitches, but more variable than a composed melody.” See Powers and Widdess, “India,” 9:98; and Rowell, Music and Musical Thought in Early India, 167. A raga is also the germ of melody on which improvisation is based.

8. That is, both the classical music of northern India and that of southern India.

9. Rowell, Music and Musical Thought in Early India, 179.

10. Roseman, Healing Sounds from the Malaysian Rainforest, 157–58 and 169.

11. Feld, Sound and Sentiment, 221

12. See, for example, Rice, May It Fill Your Soul, 124; Agawu, “Music in the Funeral Traditions of the Akpafu,” 75–105; Guilbault, “Fitness and Flexibility,” 273–99. It should be noted, however, that some societies proscribe music during periods of mourning. See Waley, The Analects of Confucius, 7/9, 124, and 17/21, 214–15. See also Cadar, “The Role of Kulintang Music in Maranao Society,” 241.

13. Al-Ghazali, “The Book of the Right Usages of Music and Trance,” 195–252 and 705–48; cited in Rouget, Music and Trance, 257–58.

14. Rouget, Music and Trance, 282. He reports that the word was used in this way even as early as the seventh century. Judith Becker defines the primary meaning of the term tarab as “to be moved, agitated, while listening to music (to the extent that one may cry, faint or tear one’s clothes).” Becker, Deep Listeners, 2.

15. For a thorough account of these views, see Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression.

16. See Plato, Republic III,1. 398–401.

17. Cf. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 8–10. See also Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §334, 262.

18. Artusi and Zarlino contended that Plato took the mode to be imitative, and Galilei and Monteverdi believed that he found imitation in the particular melody. See Walker, Musical Beliefs, 119–20.

19. See Lippman, A History of Western Musical Aesthetics, 83–94.

20. Smith, “Of the Nature of That Imitation Which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts,” 170–71.

21. Beattie, “On Poetry and Music as They Affect the Mind,” 111, 122, and 127.

22. Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 9.

23. Ibid., 10. Hanslick focuses in this discussion on absolute music, that is, music without words, since these cases reveal what music can represent through its own resources, without the cues provided by texts. Many commentators since Hanslick have followed this strategy as well. Recently, Aaron Ridley has objected to this approach, which he admits he once followed. See Ridley, The Philosophy of Music, 2–3 and 76–83.

24. Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 29.

25. Ibid., 32.

26. Hevner’s experiments in the 1930s suggested that certain features of music (e.g., pace, flowingness, mode, rhythm, complexity of harmony, etc.) tended to connote particular emotional characteristics in the music. See Hevner, “Expression in Music: A Discussion of Experimental Studies and Theories”; and Hevner, “Experimental Studies of the Elements of Expression in Music.” For more recent relevant work, see Scherer and Oshinsky, “Cue Utilization in Emotion Attribution from Auditory Stimuli”; and Scherer and Zentner, “Emotional Effects of Music.” Scherer and Zentner propose a model that acknowledges the interaction of the effects of different expressive cues, only some of which are structural.

27. The suggestion that specific structural and dynamic features of music were appropriate to different emotional content had been made long before in Western musical thought. Nicola Vincentino claimed in 1555 that quick movement and major consonances rendered music expressive of happiness and related emotions, while slow movement and minor consonances tended to make it expressive of sadness and similar emotions. See Vincentino, L’Antica Musica Ridotte Alla Moderna Prattica, fol. P ii. See also Harrán, Word-Tone Relations in Musical Thought, 176. Zarlino similarly associated harder, happier emotions with major thirds and sixths and faster movements, and sadder, sweeter emotions with minor thirds and sixths and to slower rhythms (Intitutioni Harmoniche, 181, and 192). See Harrán, Word-Tone Relations in Musical Thought, 191–92. Adam Smith also challenged the imitation theory in 1795. See “Of the Nature of That Imitation Which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts,” 161.

28. See, for example, Callen, “Transfiguring Emotions in Music,” 81.

29. Langer is convinced that the emotion represented in music cannot be equated with our usual emotional language, and hence she is not concerned that listeners differ in their characterization of the emotions represented by music.

30. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 218.

31. Ibid., 227–28.

32. See Lippman, A History of Western Musical Aesthetics, 87–92. Lippman notes that the conflation of imitation and expression was common among eighteenth-century theorists.

33. See, for example, Reid, Lectures on the Fine Arts, 49; Walker, Musical Beliefs, 131–32; Morley, A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music, 290; Liszt, “Berlioz and His ‘Harold’ Symphony,” 109; Wagner, Opera and Drama, 71 and 33.

34. See, for example, Best, The Maori, 2:135; Burrows, Native Music of the Tuamotus, 54 and 56; Burrows, Ethology of Futuna, 138; and Burrows, Songs of Uvea and Futuna, 79.

35. Clip on CNN International, September 26, 2004.

36. In a tonal language, such as Chinese, the contour of a melodic line can reinforce tonal inflection of a word. Music literally enhances the impact of speech.

37. Hsün Tzu (Xunzi), “A Discussion of Music,” in Basic Writings, 112.

38. Stravinsky, Igor Stravinsky: An Autobiography, 51.

39. Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 78.

40. DeWoskin compares him to Langer, for Ji Kang contends that music has power to articulate what words cannot, a view that Langer defends. Ji Kang, however, held that music arouses emotion, but believed that the emotions aroused varied with individual listeners.

41. DeWoskin, A Song for One or Two, 117.

42. See Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, 121–23.

43. See Dahlhaus, Esthetics of Music, 20–23.

44. See Abhinavagupta, Locana; Goswamy, Essence of Indian Art; Bharata Muni (attrib.), The Nātyaśāstra; Gerow, “Abhinavagupta’s Aesthetics as a Speculative Paradigm,” 186–208.

45. See Cone, The Composer’s Voice, 94; Levinson, “Music and Negative Emotions,” 321–22; Levinson, “Hope in The Hebrides,” 338–39; Karl and Robinson, “Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony”; Ridley, Music, Value, and the Passions, 181–91; Newcomb, “Sound and Feeling,” 637; Maus, “Music as Drama”; and Newcomb, “Action and Agency in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Second Movement.”

46. Levinson, “Hope in The Hebrides,” 338.

47. See ibid., 336–75. Cf. Levinson, “Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-Expression,” 192–221. There Levinson describes the persona as “almost entirely indefinite, a sort of minimal person, characterized only by the emotion we hear it to be expressing and the musical gesture through which it does so” (193–94).

48. Both Davies and Kivy compare the expressiveness of music to the expressiveness of the faces of particular breeds of dogs (basset hounds and St. Bernards, respectively). This leads Jenefer Robinson to term their views “The Doggy Theory” of musical expressiveness (Deeper Than Reason, 300–307).

49. See Davies, “Artistic Expression and the Hard Case of Pure Music.” Davies terms the view that full understanding of a musical work requires imagining the work to present the narrative of a persona “hypothetical emotionalism.”

50. Kivy, Introduction to a Philosophy of Music, 116.

51. Cf. Pratt, Music as the Language of Emotion, 20.

52. See Ridley, Music, Value, and the Passions, 183 and 181. Patel points out that some empirical evidence suggests that a persona figures in listeners’ perceptions of leitmotifs. See MLB, 329.

53. Ridley, Music, Value, and the Passions, 191.

54. Ibid., 181.

55. The suggestion that a more detached analytic perspective and a more engaged empathetic one are both possible was defended by Leonard Meyer in 1956. We will consider his position directly.

56. Jerrold Levinson’s “concatenationist” view—the position that “music essentially presents itself for understanding as a chain of overlapping and mutually involving parts of small extent, rather than either a seamless totality or an architectural arrangement”—would seem to lend support to this view (Music in the Moment, 13). Levinson claims, “The emotional content of music . . . is not primarily communicated to a listener by large-scale formal relations, consciously apprehended, but instead by suitably arranged parts small enough to fall within the scope of quasi-hearing” (27).

57. Merriam, The Anthropology of Music, 81. Merriam himself disagrees, for he thinks that cultural context may be essential for the musical arousal of emotion.

58. Burrows, Native Music of the Tuamotus, 54.

59. Seeger, Why Suyá Sing, 62.

60. Emotional regulation is the common term in psychology for efforts to manage a person’s emotional state and expression. Often emotional regulation is self-directed.

61. Chou Tun-I (Zhou Dunyi), “Penetrating the Book of Changes” (T’ung-Shu), 473.

62. Yo Kı¯ (“Record of Music”), XVII, II:9, 107–108. See also Hsün Tzu (Xunzi), “A Discussion of Music,” in Basic Writings, 114–115.

63. According to the Nātyaśāstra, these include erotic love (rati), mirth (ha¯sya), sorrow (s´oka), anger (krodha), energy (utsa¯ha), fear (bhaya), disgust (jugupsa¯), and astonishment (vismaya).

64. These are the translations given in Manomohan Ghosh’s translation of the Nātyaśāstra. See Bharata Muni (attrib.), The Nātyaśāstra, I, vol. 15, 102. See also Goswamy, Essence of Indian Art, 17–30. The rasas include the erotic (śr.ngāra), the comic (ha¯sya), the pathetic (in the sense of sorrowful) (ka¯un.ya), the furious (raudra), the heroic (vı¯ra), the terrible (bhaya¯naka), the odious (bı¯bhatsa), and the marvelous (adbhuta).

65. See Schueller, The Idea of Music, 20, 26–27, 30–40, and 63.

66. See Shehadi, Philosophies of Music in Medieval Islam, 28.

67. The idea that the expressive character of music results in emotional arousal became the common view of many medieval Islamic thinkers. See ibid., 120.

68. Ibid., 62–64.

69. Ibid., 74–75. Although Ibn Sina does not consider expression to be the most important function of music, he believes that music is emotionally expressive, and that the distinctive function of music is the production of delight (see 72).

70. Ibid., 120–21.

71. See Butler, The Principles of Music, 1, 56–57; and Smith, “Of the Nature of That Imitation Which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts,” 160. For a discussion of the conflict between those who thought that music should reflect people’s passions through a simple musical vocabulary and those who defended the complex music of opera, see Walker, Musical Beliefs, 122–34.

72. See Husain, Thompson, and Schellenberg, “Effects of Musical Tempo and Mode on Arousal, Mood, and Spatial Abilities,” 156. The notion of demand characteristics is analyzed in Orne, “On the Social Psychology of the Psychological Experiment with Particular Reference to Demand Characteristics and Their Implications.”

73. See EMM, 8. See also Scherer and Zentner, “Emotional Effects of Music: Production Rules,” 280.

74. Hindemith, A Composer’s World, 38 and 45–46. One can raise the question here of whether one can have memories of feelings that are not themselves feelings; but apparently Hindemith thinks one can. Cf. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 266–67.

75. Pratt, Music as the Language of Emotion, 7–8. See also Pratt, The Meaning of Music.

76. Kivy grants that the beauty of music moves listeners, but he denies that everyday emotions are aroused. See Kivy, Introduction to a Philosophy of Music, 108–9.

77. See, for example, Pratt, Music as the Language of Emotion, 7–8.

78. EMM, 31.

79. Ibid., 32.

80. See Rowell, Thinking about Music, 197.

81. For an analysis of the relationship between valued experiences in life and the artistic form, which enables its audience to undergo an integral experience that runs its course to a culmination and aftermath, see Dewey, Art as Experience.

82. Juslin and Västfjäll, “Emotional Responses to Music,” 559–75.

83. Ibid., 572–73. Alf Gabrielsson reports that 13 percent of the subjects in his study of strong emotions in connection with music reported some kind of mixed feelings. See Gabrielsson, “Strong Experiences with Music,” 561.

84. See, for example, Juslin and Västfjäll, “Emotional Responses to Music,” 560.

85. Sloboda and Juslin, “Psychological Perspectivers on Music and Emotions,” 75. See also Davidson, “On Emotion, Mood, and Related Affective Constructs”; Frijda, “Varieties of Affect,” 59–67; Goldsmith, “Parsing the Emotional Domain from a Developmental Perspective”; Kagan, “Distinctions among Emotions, Moods, and Temperamental Qualities”; Lazarus, “The Stable and the Unstable in Emotion”; Panksepp, “Basic Emotions Ramify Widely in the Brain, Yielding Many Concepts That Cannot Be Distinguished Unambiguously . . . Yet”; Watson and Clark, “Emotions, Moods, Traits, and Temperaments”; and Davidson and Ekman, “Afterword: How Are Emotions Distinguished from Moods, Temperament, and Other Related Affective Constructs?”

86. Robert Solomon makes this point regarding love. See In Defense of Sentimentality, 93. Peter Goldie also emphasizes the distinction between emotions and emotion-episodes in The Emotions, 12–14.

87. Ekman points out the cultural relativity even for display rules. See Emotions Revealed, 4.

88. See Ortony and Turner, “What’s Basic about Basic Emotions?,” 315–31.

89. Davidson, “On Emotion, Mood, and Related Affective Constructs,” 54.

90. Nico H. Frijda has defended the view that emotions necessarily have action tendencies. See The Emotions, 69–73.

91. Ridley, Music, Value and the Passions, 33. Formal objects of emotions ascribe certain properties (e.g., being disgusting) to the target object.

92. Ibid., 161.

93. Ibid., 160. See also 169.

94. Solomon, “Emotions and Choice,” 3–4.

95. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 276n.

96. Husain, Thompson, and Schellenberg, “Effects of Musical Tempo and Mode on Arousal, Mood, and Spatial Abilities.”

97. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 28.

98. Radford, “Emotions and Music,” 75.

99. My thanks to Robert C. Solomon for this suggestion. This is effectively what Ridley argues when he claims that “many emotions have co-nominal feelings: depression may be either an emotion or a feeling; so may sadness, cheerfulness, happiness, irritation and joy, among others” (Music, Value, and the Passions, 33–34).

100. Jaws (1975), directed by Stephen Spielberg, Universal Studios. Video (1975), B0009 QN4EO.

101. Titanic (1997), directed by James Cameron, Paramount Pictures. Video (1997), 0792151712.

102. Unlike Kivy, Davies claims that listeners often “mirror” emotions expressed through emotion characteristics in appearance, that is, they experience the same emotion themselves (e.g., sadness in response to the “sadness” they hear in music). In this respect, he considers the response to musically expressed emotions different from the response to everyday expressive behavior, which often arouses different emotions from those that are communicated. See Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression, 178. Psychologists refer to the phenomenon of emotional contagion, the tendency to mimic the emotional responses of another person and to consequently share the emotional feeling of that person. See Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson, Emotional Contagion.

103. Besides Davies, Levinson and Ridley also make this point. See Levinson, “Music and Negative Emotion,” 320–21n; and Ridley, Music, Value, and the Passions, 13–14.

104. Berliner, “Give and Take,” 25. For a discussion of performers’ dynamic involvement in both action and perception, with the shifts of focus that this involves, see Clarke, Ways of Listening, 151–54.

105. Thom, For an Audience, 205.

106. Gabrielsson, “Emotions in Strong Experiences with Music,” 441.

107. Frick, “Communicating Emotion”; and Juslin and Laukka, “Communication of Emotions in Vocal Expression and Music Performance.”

108. Juslin and Laukka, “Communication of Emotions in Vocal Expression and Music Performance,” 786.

109. Juslin, “Communicating Emotion in Music Performance,” 322. Levinson, “Hope in The Hebrides.”

110. Juslin, “Perceived Emotional Expression in Synthesized Performances of a Short Melody,” 248. I have already cited a study by Sandra Trehub and her colleagues confirming the claim that adults can distinguish lullabies from nonlullabies in foreign music (Trehub, Unyk, and Trainor, “Adults Identify Infant-Directed Music across Cultures”).

111. Balkwill and Thompson, “A Cross-Cultural Investigation of the Perception of Emotion in Music.”

112. This is an interesting result in terms of rasa theory (Indian emotion theory, developed in connection with the performance arts), for while joy, sadness, and anger are universally acknowledged as being among the basic rasas, the inclusion of peacefulness is controversial. One might argue that the rationale that led to the inclusion of the specific eight rasas listed in the Nātyaśāstra is that they lend themselves to dramatic portrayal. The Nātyaśāstra is, after all, a compendium of knowledge about dramatic productions. Peacefulness, however, is not included in the original list from the Nātyaśāstra, nor does it lend itself easily to dramatic presentation.

113. See Thompson and Balkwill, “Cross-Cultural Similarities and Differences.”

114. See Juslin, “Communicating Emotion in Music Performance”; Juslin and Laukka, “Communication of Emotions in Vocal Expression and Music Performance”; and Juslin and Timmers, “Expression and Communication of Emotion in Music Performance.”

115. Benamou, “Comparing Musical Affect.”

116. See Keil, “Motion and Feeling through Music”; Keil, “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music”; Keil, “The Theory of Participatory Discrepancies”; and Progler, “Searching for Swing.”

117. Hodeir, Jazz, 207. Hodeir proposes: “I would suggest that this drive is a manifestation of personal magnetism which is somehow expressed—I couldn’t say exactly how—in the domain of rhythm.”

118. Keil, “Motion and Feeling through Music,” 345.

119. Ibid., 346. Keil is convinced that vital drive has widespread applicability to other forms of music as well, including much that is non-Western. See pp. 347–48.

120. Ibid., 275.

121. Patel implies that participatory discrepancies can contribute to vital drive. He observes that “a slight misalignment of grouping and beat can add rhythmic energy to a melody in the form of anacrusis or upbeat” (MLB, 203).

122. Becker, Deep Listeners, 52. She cites in connection with her first three examples Keil, Polka Happiness, 276; Katz, “Accepting ‘Boiling Energy,’” 348; and Merriam, The Anthropology of Music, 82. See also the ancient Chinese Yo Kı¯ (“Record of Music”), XVII, III:27, 127. DeWoskin observes, however, that the “Record of Music” treats the relationship between music and emotional states as more a matter of sympathetic resonance than causation (A Song for One or Two, 97). DeWoskin also notes that in the late Han there was a shift from describing music as influencing sentiments to expressing grave sentiments, in particular, on the qin (110).

123. Juslin et al., “A Questionnaire Study of Emotion Reactions to Music in Everyday Life.” In answer to the question “How common is it that you feel the following emotions in connection with music?” the following numerical equivalents were used:

4 = always

3 = often

2 = seldom

1 = never.

In preliminary results, happiness received the highest score (3.06), followed by “pleasurable” feeling (2.97). See also Juslin and Laukka, “Expression, Perception, and Induction of Musical Emotions”; and Juslin et al., “An Experience Sampling Study of Emotional Reactions to Music.”

124. See Solomon, “Against Valence (‘Positive’ and ‘Negative’ Emotions).”

125. According to a study by Husain and colleagues, “participants enjoyed the piece more when it was played quickly in major mode or slowly in minor mode, compared with when it was played quickly in minor mode or slowly in major mode.” Husain, Thompson, and Schellenberg, “Effects of Musical Tempo and Mode on Arousal, Mood, and Spatial Abilities,” 164. See also Trainor and Schmidt, “Processing Emotions Induced by Music,” 316.

126. Husain, Thompson, and Schellenberg, “Effects of Musical Tempo and Mode on Arousal, Mood, and Spatial Abilities,” 166. They refer to Ashby, Isen, and Turken, “A Neuropsychological Theory of Positive Affect and Its Influence on Cognition.”

127. Blood and Zatorre, “Intensely Pleasurable Responses to Music Correlate with Activity in Brain Regions Implicated in Reward and Emotion,” 11822.

128. Ibid., 11823.

129. Hanslick is a striking case in point. As a philosopher of music, he denied that music could represent emotion; but his writing was replete with emotional terminology when he played his more usual role of music critic, as Kivy points out. See Kivy, “Something I’ve Always Wanted to Know about Hanslick,” 417.

130. Pater, The Renaissance, 238.

CHAPTER 8

1. Laing, The Divided Self, 39.

2. Ibid., 137–38.

3. Ibid., 50 and 92.

4. Bregman, “Auditory Scene Analysis,” 17 and 28.

5. See ibid., 18–19 and 27–28.

6. This was established by A. James Hudspeth. See “Channel Protein Converts Vibrations to Electrical Signal,” Howard Hughes Medical Institute, October 13, 2004. See also Corey et al., “TRPA1 Is a Candidate for the Mechano-Sensitive Transduction Channel of Vertebrate Hair Cells,” 723–30.

7. Becker, Deep Listeners, 127.

8. Stern’s “vitality affects” have struck a number of psychologists of music as particularly useful for making sense of the emotional character of music. See, for example, Sloboda and Juslin, “Psychological Perspectives on Music and Emotion,” 81; and Bunt and Pavlicevic, “Music and Emotion,” 194.

9. Cf. Dissanayake, Art and Intimacy; and Dissanayake “Antecedents of the Temporal Arts in Early Mother-Infant Interaction.” See also Trevarthen, “Communication and Cooperation in Early Infancy”; and Trevarthen, “Emotions in Infancy.”

10. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, 56.

11. Ibid., 54.

12. Ibid., 156.

13. Ibid., 157.

14. Ibid., 55–56.

15. Ibid., 57. Cf. Bunt and Pavlicevic, “Music and Emotion,” 194.

16. See Levinson, “Music and Negative Emotion,” 306–35; and Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression, 307–19.

17. Meyer notes a similar phenomenon in the case of certain other animals that abhor uncertainty, for example, baboons. See “Music and Emotions: Distinctions and Uncertainties,” 352 and 352n. Levinson also claims that a sense of mastering negative emotions is one of the rewards of enjoying them in the context of music. See Levinson, “Music and Negative Emotion,” 328.

18. Aaron Ridley similarly contends that a prior sense of safety is often necessary to enjoy the so-called negative emotions in music. See Music, Value, and the Passions, 151–54. Levinson also emphasizes that these emotions experienced in the context of music “typically have no life-implications,” unlike emotion in everyday life (“Music and Negative Emotion,” 324). I do not wish to rule out other reasons why we enjoy the musical arousal of emotions that we would not enjoy in everyday life. Levinson, for example, cites a number of rewards besides mastery that we gain in experiencing “negative” emotions in connection with music, including: catharsis, an enhanced grasp of the expressiveness of the musical work, the savor of feeling divorced from life-consequences, greater insight into our affective life, a gain in a sense of our own dignity owing to our capacity to feel deeply and our impression of the richness of our inner life, the opportunity to “tone up” our feelings in preparation for dealing with life situations, and perhaps the sense of “intimate contact with the mind and soul of another,” that is, the composer. See pp. 322–29. Davies, although he takes issue with some of Levinson’s suggestions, sees enjoyment of “negative” emotions as of a piece with the human willingness to face risks and confront pain and suffering in the course of life (see Musical Meaning and Expression, 319).

19. See Rouget, Music and Trance, xviii, 72, and 183.

20. See Becker, Deep Listeners, 29 and 131.

21. Becker, “Anthropological Perspectives on Music and Emotion,” 144.

22. Henderson, “Emotion and Devotion,” 440.

23. Ibid., 459–60.

24. This Hindu conception of the universal Self (atman) within everyone contrasts directly with the Buddhist doctrine that there is no self (anatman). Both views, however, postulate the same ontological status for every person.

25. Panzarella, “The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Peak Experiences,” 69–85; citation from 73.

26. Herndon and McLeod, Music as Culture, 124. Cf. Sloboda and Juslin, “Psychological Perspectives on Music and Emotion,” 87.

27. Herndon and McLeod, Music as Culture, 93–95.

28. Hāl is also the term for the ecstatic states that Sufi singers intermittently achieve. See Qureshi, Sufi Music of India and Pakistan, 80f. See also Becker, Deep Listeners, 8.

29. Safvate and Caron, Iran: Les traditions musicales, 232, cited and translated in Miller, Music and Song in Persia, 22.

30. Shankar, My Music, My Life, 57–58. Cf. Abhinavagupta, quoted in Gnoli, The Aesthetic Experience According to Abhinavagupta, 70.

31. Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” 1:318, 1008. Cf. Becker, Deep Listeners, 80, for a discussion of a similar complaint expressed in an eleventh-century Sufi text.

32. See Herndon and McLeod, Music as Culture, 112.

33. Turino, Music as Social Life, 48.

34. As was noted in chapter 4, Davies remarks on this tendency in Musical Works and Performances, 22n.

35. In rock music, according to Theodore Gracyk, “studio recordings have become the standard for judging live performances.” Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise, 84.

36. Lomax, “Folk Song Style,” American Anthropologist 61 (1959): 929.

37. Ibid., 930.

38. Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 230–31. We should, however, note the transformations that the style might undergo as it encounters and is affected by other styles as a consequence of migration.

39. Turino, Music as Social Life, 48.

40. Meyer, “On Rehearing Music,” 42–53.

41. See Meyer, “A Pride of Prejudices; or, Delight in Diversity,” 275.

42. Serafine, Music as Cognition, 32; and Keil, “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music.”

43. Sloboda and Juslin, “Psychological Perspectives on Music and Emotion,” 92.

44. Ibid., 92. See also Jackendoff, “Musical Processing and Musical Affect,” 51–68. Gracyk suggests that a consequence of Raffman’s view about nuance ineffability would seem to be that because we cannot store the nuances of a particular performance of music, a recording of that performance will, in effect, sound new every time. See Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise, 57–61, 236. Davies is skeptical about this conclusion. See Musical Works and Performances, 305.

45. Zajonc, “Exposure Effects, 194–203.

46. Ibid., 199–200. The study cited was Wilson, “Feeling More Than We Can Know.”

47. Zajonc, “Exposure Effects,” 202.

48. Portions of what follow appeared originally in Higgins, “Musical Idiosyncrasy and Perspectival Listening,” 94.

49. Said, Musical Elaborations, 80.

50. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §334, 262.

51. See Francès, The Perception of Music, 35. For a discussion of several such cases, see 34–38.

52. See EMM, 92.

53. Dowling and Harwood insist that good continuation can be overridden by other patterning principles, such as repeated notes or similarity of timbre. See Music Cognition, 158–59. Earlier we noted that we track the timbre of a violin and hear the movement of this timbre as a continuation of the same voice in a texture, and do so even when the violin's melody goes on to deviate from what we were expecting. This observation does not, however, undercut my general point that hearing music involves a recognition of continuity. When we follow the timbre of the violin as it departs from a pattern, we are interpreting its distinctive voice as continuing. We do not experience new tones produced by the violin as unrelated to what has gone before.

54. Peirce, Collected Papers, 5:395.

55. Becker indicates how subdivision of cyclical time was crucial to the development and organization of music in Java in “Time and Tune in Java.”

56. Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 118. Ethnomusicological accounts suggest that the tendency to attend to music’s ongoing continuation in time is not restricted to Western listeners. The cyclical talas, the basic rhythmic patterns employed in classical Indian music, often become perceptually submerged in the complex texture of cross rhythms between instruments, often further subdivided. The practice of audience members maintaining the basic tala by means of hand gestures allows for a magic moment, when the tala again becomes pronounced, that appears exactly in accordance with the cycle maintained by the gestures. The gestures also make the continuation of the tala a pattern for ongoing physical activity. Listeners are, in effect, sustaining the continuation of the fundamental rhythm.

57. See Csikszentmihalyi, Flow.

58. Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 233.

59. Sacks, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” 17. See also his study, “The Lost Mariner,” included in the same book.

60. Beardsley, “Understanding Music,” 70–71.

61. See Herzog, “Music in the Thinking of the American Indian,” 8–9.

62. See Schneider, “Primitive Music,” 47–49. See also See Rowell, Music in Ancient Indian Thought, 185.

63. See Rowell, Music and Musical Thought in Early India, 185.

64. See Idel, “Conceptualizations of Music in Jewish Mysticism,” 187–88. For a contemporary suggestion of this myth of music sustaining our world, consider Jefferson Airplane’s version of Crosby, Stills, and Kanter’s song “Wooden Ships,” on Volunteers, Remastered RCA CD, 2004, B00028U6B8.

65. Dowling and Harwood, Music Cognition, 231.

66. Merriam, The Anthropology of Music, 225.

67. Hsün Tzu (Xunzi), “A Discussion of Music,” in Basic Writings, 113.

68. The recording is Natalie Cole, with Nat King Cole, “Unforgettable,” on Unforgettable: With Love, Elektra/Wea, 1991, B000002H8X.

CHAPTER 9

1. Fahrenheit 9/11, directed by Michael Moore, 2004. The soldier cites the Bloodhound Gang’s “Fire, Water, Burn” (One Fierce Beer Coaster, Geffen Records, 1996, B0000000WJ) as the best song for the purpose.

2. The song was performed by a male choir in the 1966 Broadway musical from which the movie was derived. The music, including this song, was written by John Kander, and Fred Ebb wrote the lyrics.

3. Stokes, “Introduction: Ethnicity, Identity and Music,” 6; citations from Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, and Chapman, Tonkin, and McDonald, History and Ethnicity.

4. Musical flash mobs of this sort are not the only kind. Flash mobs have sometimes featured dance, political demonstration, or simply bizarre activities. A dance flash mob famously performed at Oprah Winfrey’s kickoff party for her twenty-fourth season. The hallmarks of sudden arrival at a public place and sudden dispersal seem, however, to be essential.

5. If a website of musical blunders published by the Cantus Quercus Press is to be believed, it has been used to sell quite a few other products as well. See http://www.cantusquercus.com/ fauxmercial.htm.

6. See some of the comments from self-identified non-Christians cited in Steve Jalsevac, “Christmas Hallelujah Flash Mob Video Gets Huge Reaction,” at www.lifesitenews.com/news/christmas-hallelujuh-flash-mob-video-gets-huge-reaction/.

7. See Freeman, Societies of Brains.

8. Ibid. See also http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/12/christmas-food-court-flash-mobhallelujah-chorus/.

9. Cf. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy §8, 64, for a description of “Dionysian” music’s power to break down social roles and achieve a religious transformation of consciousness.

10. Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” 122–23.

11. I emphasize narrow intraculturality here because in contemporary complex societies, one’s own “culture” may include many musical subcultures, some of which may be alien to each other. In cases such as this, the relevant intraculturality may be that of a musical subculture.

12. See Turino, Music as Social Life, 210–24.

13. See Larkin, “Looking Back at Coltrane,” 187. Larkin complains about Coltrane’s “latter day religiosity, exemplified in turgid suites such as ‘A Love Supreme’ and ‘Ascension’ that set up pretension as a way of life; that wilful, hideous distortion of tone that offered squeals, squeaks, Bronx cheers and throttled slate-pencil noises for serious consideration.”

14. For this reason we are more likely to find some perceptual affinity with music of another culture than with some atonal music that is deliberately contrived to thwart our musical expectations.

15. They are also the means through which we experience much music that is not foreign. Cf. Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock.

16. The personae I refer to here are the characters that singers personify while singing a particular song. They are not the same as the personae I discussed in chapter 7 in connection with instrumental music.

17. I suspect that the relative independence one often feels in music from the roles of daily life and their demands is the reason why some have termed music solipsistic. See Nussbaum, The Musical Representation, and Lidov, Is Language a Music?, 12. Lidov reveals the discrepancy between his use of “solipsism” and the standard philosophical sense when he remarks, “Insofar as we start out from representations of felt somatic states, we can note that music has a solipsistic bias, be it the solipsism of first person singular or plural. Music abounds in idealized images of sociality (necessarily idealized because solipsistic).” In common philosophical usage, “solipsism” implies an isolation that is too complete to allow for a meaningful sense of first person plural. What Lidov calls solipsism I would be temped to call “identification.”

18. Or on those occasions when we are particularly identified with a persona whose experience resembles our own or one who is pleading for a particular point of view (as in protest songs), we feel that the rest of the world should be singing with us.

19. Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 2, sc. 2, l. 303–8.